This relaxed but productive workshop for beginning poets, experienced poets, stalled poets, and haikuists who want to get beyond three lines is a Toronto institution! Poetry Boot Camp focuses on the pleasures of poetry and the riches that spontaneity brings, through lively directed writing strategies. You will write in ways you’d never imagined. Even if you’ve taken the Boot Camp before, you’ll be introduced to many new adventures in poetry. Stuart Ross a lot of fresh strategies up his sleeve! As always: arrive with an open mind, and leave with a writhing heap of new poems — maybe even a chapbook’s worth!
Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, and writing coach who has been leading workshops for over two decades across the country. His nine full-length poetry collections include A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016), A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015), Our Days In Vaudeville (Mansfield Press, 2013) and You Exist. Details Follow. (Anvil Press 2012). He is also co-translator (with Michelle Winters) of francophone poet Marie-Ève Comtois’ My Planet of Kites (Mansfield Press, 2015).

Stuart has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, the Alberta Book Award, and four times for the ReLit Prize; his story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009) won him the coveted ReLit ring in 2010, and his novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew won him the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction on a Jewish Theme. You Exist. Details Follow. received the only prize given to an English-language book by l’Académie de la Vie Litteraire au Tournant du 21e Siècle .

Stuart was Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine for eight years, and is editor at Mansfield Press, where he has his own imprint. Books he has edited have been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize (twice!), the Governor General’s Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. One of the books he edited won the 2013 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Learn more by contacting razovsky@gmail.com.

Return to the International Poetry Calendar.