Photo credit
Anthony Mark Photography

Biography

Angeline Schellenberg’s Manitoba Book Award-winning debut Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016) was nominated a ReLit Award for Poetry. Her elegy collection Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2022 KOBZAR Book Award. Her work has placed in Prairie Fire's poetry contests and been shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. She has also published four poetry chapbooks: Roads of Stone (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2015), Dented Tubas (Kalamalka Press, 2019), Blue Moon, Red Herring (JackPine Press, 2019), and Irises (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Most of Angeline’s poems are confessional, usually in the form of prose poetry or free verse, sometimes using found material in playful ways. She has been influenced by Méira Cook, Don McKay, Joanne Epp, and Jennifer Still. A two-time Deep Bay artist-in-residence at Riding Mountain National Park and frequent Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program mentor with the Manitoba Writers Guild, Angeline currently hosts Speaking Crow: Winnipeg longest-running poetry open mic series. Her wildest collection yet, Mondegreen Riffs is forthcoming with At Bay Press in 2024.

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

I did enjoy poetry in high school. I remember loving "High Flight." I spent summer Sunday afternoons above the prairie in my dad's Cessna, so I knew what John Gillespie Magee Jr. meant by "high in the sunlit silence."

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

In Grade 7 or 8, I had a Sunday school teacher who encouraged me to write poetry. I wrote her an illustrated booklet of rhyming spiritual poems, the letters outlined in alternating blue and red pencil crayon. In my 20s and most of my 30s, I was too caught up with earning degrees, raising children, and getting over my fear of failure to write. In spring 2011, something clicked and I found my creativity again. I applied to the Manitoba Writers Guild Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program and was paired with Méira Cook in 2012. She got me submitting to journals and applying for my first project grant. I think I first thought of myself as a poet when, at the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium in 2013, I told Don McKay I was afraid of writing narrative poetry because it might come out sounding too prosy, and he responded with something like, "Don't worry about that. You're a real poet: you can't help but be poetic!"

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

A poet's job is to help us fall in love: with the natural world, with the sound of language, with our everyday life. To remind us how to breathe.

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

I’d choose "Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye, so I could summon anywhere its gentle updraft of hope for human connection.

Publications

Title
Tell Them It Was Mozart
Publisher
Brick Books
Editors
Alayna Munce and Sue Sinclair
Date
2016
Publication type
Book
Title
Fields of Light and Stone
Publisher
University of Alberta Press
Editors
Alice Major
Date
2020
Publication type
Book
Title
Mondegreen Riffs
Publisher
At Bay Press
Editors
Jennifer Still
Date
2024
Publication type
Book
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