(Re)-launching Fresh Voices
Now welcoming editor Erin Vance, Fresh Voices is a program created by former Associate Member Lesley Strutt to showcase the excellent work being produced by the League’s associate membership.
Welcoming volunteer editor Erin Vance
Erin Vance is the author of the poetry collection A History of Touch (Guernica Editions 2022), six chapbooks of poetry, and a novella.
Erin’s poems have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Freefall, Grain, Arc Poetry Magazine, EVENT, Plenitude, Contemporary Verse 2, and more. In 2017, Erin was a recipient of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize (nominated by Aritha van Herk) and a finalist for the 2018 Alberta Magazine Awards for her short story “All the Pretty Bones.”
Erin holds a Masters Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary and a Masters Degree in Irish Folklore and Ethnology from University College Dublin.
She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry summer course at Queen’s University Belfast in 2018 and 2020, and was a fellow of Summer Literary Seminars in Nairobi in December 2018. Erin attended the Writers Guild of Alberta Banff Centre Residency in February 2019 and worked with author and editor Kimmy Beach as part of the 2019 WGA Mentorship Program.
Erin splits her time between the Alberta Foothills and the Orkney Islands.
Fresh Voices is a program crafted by and for the League’s Associate membership. Started by the late Lesley Strutt, and continued through the incredible volunteer efforts of Joan Conway, Blaine Marchand, and most recently Erin Vance, Fresh Voices has made a home for over 100 emerging poets and their work.
In the spring of 2024, Fresh Voices changed from a tri-annual publication to a weekly publication included in Poetry Pause each Friday. With this change, the submission process also changed. Please note the following guidelines:
Simultaneous submissions are welcome
- Poets must be Associate Members of the League
- Poets may have up to two (2) poems under consideration for Fresh Voices at any given time (this does not include any poems under consideration for general Poetry Pause)
- Poems may not include quotes from other work(s)
- Filename should be the poem title
- Poems must be previously unpublished
Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members.
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