Please join the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures in celebrating Daphne Marlatt on the occasion of the awarding of an Honourary Degree (Doctor of Letters, honoris causa). We are thrilled to be able to recognize the career of this distinguished poet, critic, public intellectual, and teacher with an intimate conversation and reading in BUTO. Let’s welcome this 1964 alumna home!
Event: “A Reading and Conversation in Celebration of Daphne Marlatt. ” May 21 from 5:00-6:15 (Buchanan Tower 323).
Following a reading from her latest chapbook, Laura Moss and Miranda Burgess will join Daphne Marlatt in conversation about her ground-breaking work, her life in literature, and her poetic legacy.
(Note that the degree conferral will be on May 20th at 1:30 pm and this department celebration will be on Thursday May 21 at 5:00 pm.)
This event can be attended in-person only. Please be sure to register using the link below. This event is open to everyone.
RSVP:
Please RSVP below for this event by 12 noon on Tuesday, May 19th. A reminder will be sent to you a few days before the event.
About the speaker:
Since graduating with a degree in English and Creative Writing from UBC in 1964, Daphne Marlatt has become one of the most significant Canadian writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. She has published extensively and with great acclaim in a range of genres, including two novels, Ana Historic (1988) and Taken (1996); more than 15 books of poetry, including Vancouver Poems (1972), Steveston (1974), How hug a stone (1983), Touch to my tongue (1984), Salvage (1991), This Tremor Love Is (2001), The Given (2008), Liquidities (2012), and Splinters and Streams (2025); a travel memoir of Mexico, Zócalo (1977); works of poetic theory, Readings from the Labyrinth (1998) and Narrative in the Feminine (with Nicole Brossard, 2000); and works of non-fiction such as Steveston Recollected: A Japanese-Canadian History (1975) and Opening Doors: Vancouver’s East End (1980), both of which stem from her work with the British Columbia Archives oral history project. She has also played an active role in Canadian publishing, serving as editor of the Capilano Review from 1973 to 1976, co-editing the prose magazine Periodics from 1977 to 1981, and helping to launch in 1984 the feminist editorial collective and bilingual journal Tessera, for which she was a founding co-editor. Her work has been recognized through numerous awards including the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award (2012), her induction into the Order of Canada (2006), and regular invitations to read across Canada, in the United States, Japan, the UK, and Australia. It is wonderful that UBC is now recognizing this important alumna as well.