ground, field, figure: poets and critics in relation 

Thursday March 20^th 2025, 5pm-7pm
Rocket Science Room, 170 Rue Jean-Talon O #204

What does it mean to draw the work of living poets into the realm of critical commentary and conversation, and what does it mean to be the poet whose work is thus drawn? 

Please join Poetry Matters for a conversation with Liz Howard (Concordia) and Sarah Dowling (University of Toronto) on being poets and critics in relation. Moderated by Carmen Faye Mathes (McGill), this event is at once a celebration of Dowling’s new book, Here is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form and an opportunity to reflect on the grounds of poetic making with an award-winning poet.

Liz Howard is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher, whose work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the liberatory potentials of language as art. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario (Chapleau), she is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. She is the author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, which won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, which was shortlisted for the Griffin in 2022. Howard’s work has been performed and published internationally as well as in translation. She is an assistant professor in English and Creative Writing at Concordia University.

Sarah Dowling is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature, Women, Gender, and Sexual Studies at the University of Toronto whose research and teaching focus on language politics, settler colonialism, and contemporary writing. With a special interest in poems written between and across languages, Dowling is the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism (2018) as well as several books of poetry. Dowling’s new book, Here is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (2024), works across genres to explore figures of recumbency in contemporary writing.