DOWNLOADABLE GRAPHICS | NPM16 EVENTS | FRANCAIS

We’re so excited to celebrate poetry with you this month! Here on the blog, we’ll have guest posts on poetry and travel from JC Bouchard and Alessandra Naccarato, as well as a virtual road trip across Canada with posts highlighting reading series and local presses from coast to coast! Throughout the month we’ll also be featuring all the amazing poets shortlisted for our Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Raymond Souster Award, plus the winner of the 10th annual Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award for spoken word. You’ll find interviews, excerpts, and photos from each of the poets over the course of the next four weeks!

This year, we’re celebrating THE ROAD: the roads we travel, the roads we wish to travel, the roads we’ve found and made and cherished for decades. Since 1998, the League of Canadian Poets has been bringing together schools, publishers, booksellers, libraries, literary organizations, and poets from across the country to celebrate poetry in Canada—in 2016, we’ll look at the roads that brought us here, and we want to know about the roads most important to your literary journey. Even more, we want to know about the roads in your future, in our future, in the future of poetry in Canada.

We’re also excited to spread the word about what YOU have planned for NPM16! You can find a list of literary events celebrating National Poetry Month all across Canada on our special NPM16 events page, here; If you would like to include your event in this listing, please email [email protected] with the following information: name of your event, date and time, location (including city and address), a link, and 1-3 sentences of description. Please do not include any visual materials.

As part of the National Poetry Month celebrations, Poem in Your Pocket day will take place on April 21! Poem in Your Pocket Day is an annual initiative organized by the Academy of American Poets to celebrate National Poetry Month. The League is very excited to be joining this initiative for the first time in 2016, adding some of our favourite Canadian poems and poets to the mix! Find more information about Poem in Your Pocket, including a free downloadable guide, at poets.ca/pocketpoem.

Make sure to follow along with not just us, but everyone joining in on the NPM16 celebrations! For spotlighted events and daily updates from the League you can check out our Facebook page, or for a more detailed look at cross-country NPM celebrations you can follow us on Twitter! The official hashtag for the month is #NPM16, but we’ve also seen alternative hashtags like #napowrimo (for the NPM writing challenge-seekers) and #poetrymonth. You can also find great tweets from our Poetry City participants–Mayors and cities–with the hashtag #PoetryCity.

See you on the road!