As April is National Poetry Month, Robertson Library has been highlighting poets associated with UPEI all month, and this week, we conclude this celebration with Dr. Laurie Brinklow.
Academic, poet, and author, Laurie founded Acorn Press in 1993. She was its publisher until she sold it in 2010 to pursue her PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania.
Laurie is currently the UPEI Chair of the Institute of Island Studies Executive Committee and Co-ordinator of the Master of Arts in Island Studies program and Undergraduate Island Studies Minor program.
Her awards are many. In 2002, she received the Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts in Prince Edward Island. In 1998, she won first prize in the Atlantic Poetry Competition and was runner-up in the League of Canadian Poets Poetry Competition. In 2018, Laurie was acknowledged with the Hessian Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Sessional Instructor at the University of Prince Edward Island. In 2022, her second book of poetry, My island’s the house I sleep in at night, received the Prince Edward Island Book Award for Poetry.
The following is a stanza from her Living at Sea Level - Beachcombing (viii) poem, which appears in the 2012 publication Here for the Music:
Living at Sea Level - Beachcombing (viii)
we’ve spent the afternoon
lazy in the heat
combing the shore for beachglass
(blue the holy grail now that Noxzema started using plastic)
7-Up greens
beer bottle browns
frosty whites
become windows
two clamshells round oversized doors
and driftwood bendy bridges over
moats afloat with marram grass
we’ve pulled from the dunes behind us
Laurie Brinklow's poetry publications:
- Scars (Saturday Morning Chapbooks, 2004)
- Here for the Music (Acorn Press, 2012)
- My island’s the house I sleep in at night (Island Studies Press, 2021)