Guest Poet, Elee Kraljii Gardiner
Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of the book of poems serpentine loop (Anvil Press), one of 2016’s “most anticipated spring releases,” named to three “Best of” lists of the year in Canada as well as shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. She is the co-editor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award. A handmade chapbook, Trauma Head (Otter Press, 2017) is a precursor to her second book of poetry with the same name (Trauma Head, Anvil Press, spring 2018) that has already been shortlisted for the Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is currently editing Against Death (forthcoming Anvil Press), an anthology of essays by those who have come close to dying. Elee founded Thursdays Writing Collective, a low-barrier, non-profit organization of more than 150 writers in Vancouver and she is the editor and publisher of eight of their anthologies. She is originally from Boston and is a dual US/Canadian citizen.
Elee’s efforts to foster writers earned the 2015 Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. She is also the recipient of CV2’s Lina Chartrand Award in 2011 and in 2014 was a finalist for Malahat’s Far Horizons Prize.
Her writing is published in places including TCR, Event, Prism International, Lemonhound.com. Hers was the first poem published in Harvard Medicine Journal in more than 40 years. She is a contributor to several anthologies such as ForceField (Mother Tongue), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press), Enpipe Line (Creekstone), Alive at the Centre (Ooligan Press), Sustenance(Anvil Press) and forthcoming in Gush (Frontenac) and Ghost Fishing (Split This Rock).
Elee is on the advisory board of the Andover Breadloaf Project and the editorial board of Poetry is Dead. She was a member of the Advisory Council of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and has served twice on the City of Vancouver Book Award jury. She is a founding member of CWILA(Canadian Women in Literary Arts) and a two-time member of their Critic in Residence jury. She is a Poetry Ambassador for Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose and a mentor with Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.