Image credit: Claude Roy, "Regardez-Vous Un Peu Dans La Glace" (Enfantasques)
Erina Harris is the author of The Stag Head Spoke, short-listed for the Canadian Authors’ Association (CAA) Poetry Award, 2015. Her writing has been published internationally and in translation. Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead, her second book of poetry and lyric essays, will be published in the fall of 2024.
Her hybrid writing practice crosses and troubles genres including: feminist experimental poetics, adaptation, translation, drama, the lyric essay, and creative non-fiction.
Her writing has received numerous prizes including the THIS Magazine Great Literary Hunt Award, the People’s Poetry Prize, ARC Editor’s Choice Poem and short-listings and/or nominations for The Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, the Ralph Gustavson Poetry Prize, the Air Canada Award, the National Magazine Award, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award (Exile Literary Quarterly), Best Canadian Poetry, the Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing, the National Graduate Association Award for Most Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation, and The Pushcart Prize.
A long-standing activist, curator and provocateur both within and outside of the academy, for a decade she curated Blue Betty’s Bistro: Guerilla Encounters in the Literary Arts, including panel discussions, interventions, and the yearly Cowgirl Shindig: International Women’s Day Reading Event featuring Innovative Women Writers, a fund-raiser for local women’s shelters.
A graduate and Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA), she completed her Ph.D. in Poetics at the University of Calgary and completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship (SSHRC) in Social Poetics and Pedagogy at the University of Alberta.
Her protean writing practice continuously revisits meditations on gender, subjectivity, ecopoetics, power, otherness, sublimity, and the decolonial imaginary…towards imagining increasingly compassionate and inquisitive human and ecological communities.
Erina has received Residency awards and served as Writer-in-Residence at AIR Krems (Austria, awarded twice) and at the Miško Kranjec Writers’ House, Velika Polana, Slovenia. She has recently been awarded a 2024 artist residency at HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística in Lisbon, Portugal.
Her creative writing and scholarship have been generously supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Edmonton Arts Council, The Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Waterloo Regional Arts Fund, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (CIH), the Universities of Calgary and Alberta, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral/CGS and Post-Doctoral Awards (SSHRC). Her activism was honoured by a nomination for the Waterloo Regional Woman of the Year Award in the Arts.
As an Instructor of Creative Writing and Literature, she is dedicated to the study and practice of innovative and anti-racist pedagogies. Erina’s pedagogical approaches were nominated for Distinguished Teaching Awards (Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa), and she was awarded the “Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award for Innovative Pedagogy in Creative Writing/CCWWP” in 2016. She works, ongoing, as a professional freelance editor for upcoming and published writers (creative non-fiction, poetry, fiction).