Canadian Poets Series #9 : Jen Currin

Jen Currin's most recent book is Disembark, a collection of stories which focuses on queer lives (House of Anansi, 2024). Hider/Seeker: Stories was a finalist for a ReLit Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. They have also published five collections of poetry, most recently Trinity Street (Anansi, 2023) [see my review of such here], The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for a LAMBDA, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award; and School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award. Jen has also published poems and stories in numerous U.S. and Canadian journals and magazines, including Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, VERSE, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Cream City Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Mississippi Review, PRISM International, and Washington Square. You can catch recent poems online at Trampoline, Limp Wrist, The Elephants and Carousel, with an interview conducted by Rebecca Jamieson for Hunger Mountain Review, and a further, conducted by Cathalynn Labonté-Smith for the Victoria Festival of Authors. Currin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Clackamas, Chinkook, Tualatin, and other tribes. They currently live on the ancestral and unceded Qayqayt, Musqueam, Kwikwetlem, and Kwantlen Nation territories in New Westminster, BC, (a suburb of Vancouver) and teach creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.