Karen Solie

Karen Solie was UNB’s twenty-fifth writer-in-residence for the 2006-2007 academic year. Solie was born in Moose Jaw in 1966, living on a family owned farm with her parents in the south of Saskatchewan. She won the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Prize for her first poetry collection, Short Haul Engine, published in 2001 by Brick Books. Short Haul Engine had Solie nominated for the 2002 Griffen Poetry Prize. In 2005 she released Modern and Normal through the same publisher of her first collection, Brick Books. In 2009 Solie released Pidgeon with the House of Anansi Press, and Pigeon ended up making Karen Solie the Canadian Winner of the 2010 Griffin Poetry prize.

During her time in residence, Solie gave a reading at the Fredericton public library on February 21^st, primarily from Modern and Normal, and she also held a reading at UNB Saint John on March 12^th hosted by UNBSJ's Lorenzo Society, also reading from her Mordern and Normal collection. While she was the writer-in-residence at UNB, Karen Solie served as a judge for the Griffen Poetry Prize.

Solie was preceded by Catherine Bush, and succeeded by Patricia Young.

In an interview with Patrick Watson, Karen Solie was asked if she considered the authors of material she drew from for her found poetry, to be poets. Her answer about this and found poetry was: "I don't necessarily consider poets those authors whose texts I went to for the found poems. Though they might be, I don't know. One thing I was trying to do was to foreground the importance of line breaks and form to poetry. How these can create, in concert with content, the internal tension that makes a poem a poem. Great content alone is not enough."

Notes:

Source(s):

 UA Case 191; Section 2; Karen Solie