Poet Sharon Irvine Wins Khoui Award

Poet Sharon Irvine

Sharon Irvine is one good poet as many people in Thunder Bay know. On Saturday, May 12, she won the Elizabeth Kouhi award, and well deserved it is. 

The Elizabeth Kouhi Award, named in honour of Thunder Bay poet Elizabeth Kouhi, is awarded each year to a writer whose body of work has a significant history of contributing to the literature of Northwestern Ontario.

Irvine is a writer, teacher and poet whose work has appeared in Core, 807, Squeeze, The Whiskey Jack, and Northern Nurses, as well as Core Samples and Watching the Parade, her first collection of poetry.

THE MORE YOU KNOW

Just when

you think you know

all there is to know

about pain,

you lose a child.

That is when you realize

how incomplete

your knowledge is.

poem by Sharon Irvine from her collection Watching the Parade

Read on!

Wonderful so to see so many people attending the readings around town. NOWW had a good crowd at the Brodie Library to hear Sharon Irvine read a poem as well as a hilarious short story. Great stories and book excerpts followed including an excerpt from Foreclosure by Jackie D'Acre.  (the title of the book Foreclosure was changed to Hot Blooded Murder in 2018)

Several people said Ivan Coyote is one of Canada's premier teller of tales. She was at the Northern Woman's Bookstore on Court St. November 28. On December 2, Erin Stewart and others presented poetry to an appreciative audience at the same bookshop. Erin took first prize in NOWW's 2008 poetry contest. Below a poem by Erin.

Tracks
You left the same way
you came, across a pathway
in my backyard.

Combatting insomnia
I'd rotate my bed to
face the window, set
my feet in the daylight
to distract my mourn

But waking now I see
a world ahead without you.

Owning more energy, I might
Leap out the window into
the bird-marked snow
where your last ones have disappeared

(Poem, Tracks, previously published in 807: A Northwestern Ontario Literary Review.)