Catherine Owen is a New Westminster poet and writer, the author of nine collections of poetry and a collection of essays and memoirs, Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse.
Her work has been nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, the BC Book Prize, the ReLit Award, the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, Short Grain, and The Earle Birney Prize. Frenzy (Anvil), won the Alberta Literary Award in 2009.
Owens’ Trobairitz, (2012) explored correspondences between 12th century troubadour poetry and contemporary metal music.
Those correspondences are surprisingly nuanced and delicate, not what most people might expect from a poet who plays bass in the metal bands Inhuman and Helgrind. Not surprisingly the Malahat Review observes that Owen “shakes up a lot of categories, blurring the line between poetry and non-fiction, reconfiguring the relationship between writer and muse . . .”
Her most recent book, Designated Mourner, is a series of elegies.
She says it feels right to wrap up a cross-Canada reading tour of the book with her reading here on Saturday, Nov. 1, the Day of the Dead.
Hear her at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt at 8 p.m. Admission is by donation, courtesy of the Canada Council and the Sunshine Coast Arts Council.
