Held at the Hotel Arts in Calgary, this year’s annual conference had a lot to offer. The highlight was Minister of Culture and Tourism Ricardo Miranda’s announcement of new funding for the publishing industry: $300,000 for each of the next four years. This will be a lifesaver for some smaller publishers, while enabling established ones […]
“What’s that?”, you ask? Poetry Reading Season is when the University of Alberta Press is accepting poetry manuscripts for consideration to be published in the Robert Kroetsch Series of Canadian creative writing. Back in 2014, we started to streamline the submission process to make it more manageable to handle the increasing number of poetry manuscripts […]
How do you think up the title for a lecture—especially after you’ve given it? This is the challenge facing UAP author Alice Major, who was invited to give the prestigious Anne Szumigalski lecture in June, at the Canadian Writers Summit. “The title can be the toughest line to write in a poem,” says Alice. “Or […]
“Alberta for generations was famous for mountains, rodeos, Mormonism, football, Ukrainian culture, meatpacking and Social Credit. Say ‘Alberta’ today and any focus group replies, ‘oil’. That’s no accident, writes Prof. Geo Takach of Royal Roads University. From the 1947 oil strike at Leduc Number One, ‘resource extraction became heroic’. Alberta’s very identity was intertwined with oil […]
This was the first time that the University of Regina hosted the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The university, city, and province did a wonderful job of putting on the conference, right down to offering free city bus service to delegates. Highlights, beyond the bookfair of course, included: The theme: Gathering Diversities. An […]
We have some great news to share! Norma Dunning has won the prestigious Danuta Gleed Literary Award, given to the writer of the best first short story collection in Canada. The stories in Annie Muktuk and Other Stories portray the unvarnished realities of northern life via strong and gritty characters. Jury members praised Dunning for crafting “spellbinding narratives” […]
If you have a hard time figuring out what to get for your father or father figure in your life, you might consider a new book by award-winning author Heather O’Neill. Wisdom in Nonsense is full of wry and witty stories of unconventional mentors that provided the foundation of O’Neill’s writing life. “[Heather O’Neill’s] father shared […]
“In Little Wildheart, Micheline Maylor writes poems that chart the vagaries of love, its cycles of loss and renewal, followed by a realization about the joy and freedom in reinhabiting the self without outside commitment…. Maylor draws images from an elementary and animal world to reflect the psyche and its spiritual progress. Allusive and elusive, […]
Book publishers from all over Alberta came together in the Federal Building on the ides of May to celebrate and promote our industry to Members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta and legislature staff. The Minister of Culture and Tourism, Ricardo Miranda, joined us to make proclaim May 15 Alberta Book Day. Our newest Intern, […]
April 26 was a great day as Spring finally arrived and we saw readers of poetry and short fiction filling the Winspear Room of the Faculty Club. The University of Alberta Press’s 14th Literary Cocktails saw more than 100 people in attendance—with standing room only at one point—to the delight of our readers, staff, MC, […]