Alice Major


Alice Major is a Canadian poet, writer, and essayist, who served as poet laureate of Edmonton, Alberta.
She has published 12 collections of poetry and a collection of essays on poetry and science. Her work has received multiple awards, most recently an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta.

Biography

Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto, Ontario before working as a weekly newspaper reporter in central British Columbia. She has lived in Edmonton, Alberta since 1981. She has a BA from Trinity College, Toronto at the University of Toronto. Her first book was a prize-winning YA fantasy novel. Since then she has published 12 books of poetry and an essay collection on poetry and science.
She is past-president of both the Writers' Guild of Alberta and the Canadian Poets, as well as former chair of the Edmonton Arts Council. In 2005, she was appointed to a two-year term as the first poet laureate for the City of Edmonton, and then went on to receive the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2017. During her tenure as poet laureate, she founded the Edmonton Poetry Festival in 2006. In November 2019 she received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta.

Awards (selected)

Shortlisted (selected)

Works (selected)

Books

  • The Chinese Mirror.  
  • Time Travels Light.  
  • Lattice of the Years. Bayeux Arts Inc. 1998..
  • Tales for an Urban Sky. Broken Jaw Press. 1999..
  • Corona Radiata.
  • Some Bones and a Story.  
  • No Monster  
  • The Occupied World. .
  • The Office Tower Tales  
  • Memory's Daughter
  • Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science
  • Standard Candles
  • Welcome to the Anthropocene
  • ''Knife on Snow''

Presentations/Papers (selected)

Scansion and Science – The Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture, Toronto, 2017.A superposition of brains – Provost’s Lecture at Stony Brook University of New York.Numbers with Personality: Ordinal Linguistic Personification – presentation to plenary session, Bridges Conference on Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Education, Culture.Convocation address – University of Alberta honorary degree presentation, 2019.Perhaps the Plaintive Numbers Flow – presented at Bridges Conference on Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture.

Anthologies (selected)

Going it Alone: Plays by Women for Solo Performance. What if...? Amazing stories, Monica Hughes Ed. Threshold: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing from Alberta. Poetry and Spiritual Practice: Selections from Contemporary Canadian Poets  Reading the River: A traveller’s companion to the North Saskatchewan River How the Light Gets In: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Canada Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography
  • ''Waiting: An Anthology of Essays''