Photo credit
Jason Graham

Biography

Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and she currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine, a journal of literary non-fiction based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove, is a book-length long poem that attempts to articulate the meaning of home as a descendent of prairie homesteaders. Rove was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Laurie's second book, Settler Education, addresses the various ways that oppression of Indigenous people by settler society reverberates in the present tense. Settler Education was nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. A third book, called Fast Commute, about the existential costs of unfettered resource extraction, was also nominated for the Trillium Award for Poetry, in 2023. Laurie often works with the long poem, the lyric poem, and the found poem.

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 got to know Maya Angelou in junior high school after reading her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and I remember both her story and later her verse having a strong effect on me. Her poem “Caged Bird” echoes her autobiography, and I recall liking the musicality of it. I studied music before I studied poetry, so Angelou’s work was a good gateway for me:

The caged bird sings   
with a fearful trill   
of things unknown   
but longed for still   
and his tune is heard   
on the distant hill   
for the caged bird   
sings of freedom.
When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

I’ve been writing poetry for a long time — since childhood — but it wasn't until I got a bit older that I started understanding the stuff I was writing as poetry. I only started thinking of myself as a writer of poetry in my early twenties. That’s when I started getting deliberate about writing.

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

More and more I think the poet’s “job” is to figure out how to live as an invested, attentive, conscientious, sensing being and to take notes while you’re doing that. 

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

Give me any of the Lorna Crozier, the Dionne Brand, the Fred Wah, the Marilyn Dumont, the Allen Ginsberg, the Joy Harjo, the Dennis Lee...

Publications

Title
Fast Commute
Publisher
McClelland & Stewart
Editors
Dionne Brand
Date
2022
Publication type
Book
Title
Settler Education
Publisher
McClelland & Stewart
Editors
Dionne Brand
Date
2016
Publication type
Book
Title
Rove
Publisher
Hagios Press
Editors
Harold Rhenisch
Date
2013
Publication type
Book
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