Born in Winnipeg, Laura Matwichuk of Vancouver was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year. With a Masters in Art History, she has also graduated from SFU Writers Studio and completed a five-week residency in the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre in 2013. Her debut poetry collection has a beguiling title, Near Miss (Nightwood $18.95). Blurbage credits "the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life." We hope someone feels tempted to concoct the headline: Near Miss is a Hit. Her poems have appeared in literary journals in Canada and the US and in The Best Canadian Poetry in English. "From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents," we're told, "these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life's unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, gratitude and hopefulness." It's about life on earth. 978-0-88971-353-6 / 2019

[BCBW 2019]