Please join The Battery Café to help celebrate the launch of award-winning poet Richard Harrison's latest book My Mother Joins the Resistance. He will be joined by Michelle Porter and the reading will be followed by a question answer period led by Aaron Tucker.
Richard Harrison is the winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. Richard’s writings have been published across Canada as well as in the United States, England and Italy. His individual poems, and two books, have been translated into six languages including Spanish, Farsi, French and Arabic. This year he was honoured with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Golden Pen for Lifetime Achievement. Professor Emeritus of English at Mount Royal University, currently Richard is a full-time poet, essayist, editor and writing mentor in Calgary, where he lives with his wife, Lisa.
A descendant of Métis storytellers from the prairie homeland, Michelle Porter’s next novel A Glacier’s Guide to Dying (Penguin), will be available in September of 2026 and her next book of poetry, Yellow Pears (McClelland & Stewart), in the spring of 2027. Her debut novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, was a national bestseller, won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Award. In addition to her acclaimed fiction, she is the author of two nonfiction works (Scratching River and Approaching Fire) and a debut poetry collection (Inquiries), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award. Her poetry has also been recognized by the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2020, 2022, and 2024. Michelle teaches creative writing and Métis literature at Memorial University.
Aaron Tucker is the author of seven books, including the novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys (Coach House Books, 2023) and the forthcoming Flexible Faces (McGill-Queens University Press, Nov. 2026). He currently teaching creative writing and media studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.
