Open Word: Readings and Ideas with Sina Querays

Artist: Sina Querays

Date: February 23, 2010

Open Space, in partnership with the University of Victoria Department of Writing, hosted award-winning Montreal poet Sina Queyras as part of its literary series Open Word: Readings and Ideas. The reading followed by an interview with Victoria poet and philosopher Tim Lilburn as well as a second reading hosted by the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria.

Sina Queyras’s latest book is Expressway, a road poem that uses both Romantic and innovative techniques and modes of address to critique our high-speed, car-obsessed society and the infrastructure that supports it. Queyras’s expressway is not just a road, but a symbol for a culture lacking in social and environmental conscience, paradoxically disconnecting us from nature and from each other even as it connects place to place.

Sina Queyras is the author of four books of poetry, including Lemon Hound, which won the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Award. She is the editor of Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, has published short fiction and keeps a popular literary blog at http://www.lemonhound.blogspot.com.  Queyras currently teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. As a child, she spent long hours in the backseat of her mother’s car, following her road builder father on jobs across the country and gaining a wide appreciation for, and insight into, the politics of roadways.

Open Word: Readings and Ideas was funded by The Canada Council for the Arts, the CRD, KOTO Restaurant,
Open Space and the University of Victoria Department of Writing.