Richard Harrison

Join us for our “First Friday” event of July with acclaimed poet Richard Harrison who will be reading from his latest book, My Mother Joins the Resistance, talking about his background, books, and answering questions from the audience.

Richard Harrison is the winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. Richard’s writings have been published across Canada as well as in the United States, England and Italy. His individual poems, and two books, have been translated into six languages including Spanish, Farsi, French and Arabic. This year he was honoured with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Golden Pen for Lifetime Achievement. Professor Emeritus of English at Mount Royal University, currently Richard is a full-time poet, essayist, editor and writing mentor in Calgary, where he lives with his wife, Lisa.

In this latest collection My Mother Joins the Resistance Richard Harrison has created a companion to his Governor General’s Award–winning collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. In My Mother Joins the Resistance, Harrison considers with elegant, deeply felt poetry the meaning of his mother’s life – from what she suffered as a child during WWII to her death, in 2017, when terminally ill with cancer, she chose MAiD. These are beautiful poems, ones that piece together a person, a life and a family over generations. These are poems that examine the wounds passed down through a family, alongside the love, and see the echoes of both – the wounds and the love – in the world around us.