Griffin Prize-Winning Poet A.F. Moritz to Give VIU Gustafson Lecture and Reading

February 17, 2022 - 9:30am

The annual lecture will take place on March 3, 2022, on the Nanaimo campus.

A.F. Moritz, one of Canada’s most esteemed and decorated poets, is Vancouver Island University’s (VIU’s) Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet for 2021-22.

The annual lecture will take place on March 3 in the Ralph Gustafson Lecture Theatre in Building 355 at VIU’s Nanaimo campus.

His talk, entitled “Poetry: Future Present of the Past” will discuss the phenomenon of what writers choose to let live on the page.

“For all my love of writing, reading, books, printed pages, I insist that poetry is in its sound,” writes Moritz. “Then what is the role of the preserved poem, the written poem, the poem perhaps written while it is being sung, bit by bit?”

After recently publishing a collection of his selected works, Moritz has come to believe that all poems engage the mystery of what memories and feelings in us are chosen and developed, what is not just experienced but left for posterity.

A.F. Moritz has written more than 20 books of poetry and won numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also won the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, the Southwest Review’s Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award, the ReLit Award, selection to the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and three of his books have been named finalists for the Governor General’s Award. In 2021, As Far As You Know was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Award. Moritz is presently the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto (2019-2023).

Moritz will deliver this year’s Gustafson Lecture in person at the Ralph Gustafson Lecture Theatre in the Arts and Sciences Building (Building 355, masks and proof of vaccination required). On Wednesday, March 2, Moritz will read from his work at the Innovation Room in the Windsor Plywood Trades Discovery Centre (Bldg 108, Room 105, masks required). Both events are open to the public and will be live streamed.