Kelly Norah Drukker is a poet and non-fiction writer. Her debut collection of poems, Small Fires (McGill-Queen’s University Press), won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal (2016). Petits feux, a French-language translation by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné, was published by Le lézard amoureux in 2018.
Kelly has worked and taught English as a Second Language in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, and France. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in The Malahat Review, carte blanche, Vallum, The Goose, Contemporary Verse 2, Montreal Review of Books, The Island Review, The SHOp, enRoute Magazine, Room Magazine, and Poetry New Zealand. Her poetry has received a CBC Literary Award (2006), a Norma Epstein Prize for Creative Writing (2013), and has been long-listed for the Montreal International Poetry Prize (2011). In 2020, her non-fiction essay “Thin” was a finalist for the 3Macs carte blanche Prize.
Kelly has performed her work at venues such as Blue Metropolis (Montreal), Le Salon du livre de Montréal, the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival, Prose in the Park (Ottawa), Lit Live (Hamilton), The Toronto Festival of Authors, Sappho Poetry Night (Sydney, Australia), and North West Words (Letterkenny, Ireland). In 2019, she led a workshop called “Expanding Our Poetic Range through Memory, Place, and the Senses” for the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Kelly holds a Master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University, and is currently pursuing her PhD in interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia.
In a classroom setting, Kelly is ready to offer readings of her work, followed by a discussion about travel and exploration of landscapes—and this includes those in our own backyard—as fertile ground for poetic material. She also offers creative writing workshops in which students are encouraged to generate new material on the spot through guided exercises, free writing, and memory work. Her emphasis is on the workshop as a place to build, rather than critique, new writing. Kelly’s particular interests are in poetry, place-based writing, oral history, family narratives, memoir, and creative non-fiction. She is prepared to integrate any of these genres into a workshop.