Canadian Poets Series #17 : Melanie Dennis Unrau

Melanie Dennis Unrau [photo credit: Jason Unrau] is a white-settler poet, editor, scholar, parent, and climate organizer from Treaty One territory and Métis homeland in Winnipeg. Melanie is the author of Goose (Assembly, 2025) [see my review of such here]; The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024), which was a finalist for a PROSE Award for Excellence in Humanities; and Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013), which was shortlisted for two Manitoba Book Awards. She has published a chapbook, The Goose (above/ground, 2022), and a zine, the tracking lines (DIY Methods, 2023). A chapbook with working title “grocery slip” is forthcoming with Gap Riot Press. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and periodicals including Exposed, Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times, Intotemak, and Mosaic journal. With the other members of the Land and Labour Poetry Collective, Melanie co-edited the poetry anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Roseway, 2025). A former editor of The Goose journal, and a former editor and poetry editor of Geez magazine, Mel also edited G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] issue 17 on Petropoetics. She co-edited the Poetics and Extraction issue of Canadian Literature (2022) and Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat (Palgrave, 2014). One other highlight from Mels’ scholarly publications is the journal-article-turned-“imaginary comic” “Founding Fathers (in a Tailings Pond).” You can view the Winnipeg launch of Goose online, watch Mel read three Goose poems in an above/ground press awp offsite reading, listen to her interview about Goose with Michael Elves on UMFM’s Turning Pages, and hear interviews about The Rough Poets with Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network and with Nadia Kidwai on CBC Manitoba. And you can read her recent interviews with Open Book, Prairie Books Now, and rob mclennan’s blog. In fall 2025, Mel is the Writer in Residence at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba.