HEAR
THE
RIVER
POETRY EVENT
October 18th 2025
2-4 pm
$10
An afternoon of poetry reading & spoken word performances with four powerful female voices
Emcee Rebecca Diem, Owen Sound Poet Laureate, will host Catherine Graham, Frances Boyle, Murgatroyd Monaghan, and Laurie Koensgen to share their art and take us into their imagination.
Catherine Graham
Catherine Graham is a poet, novelist, and creative writing instructor at UofT. Her latest collection, Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Work, features poems circling family, healing, loss, and love. Her ethereal imagery and delight in the natural world make these poems special. The publishing house writes: here, birds are gathered in bouquets, a ghost is a fold in the mind, and snow holds light. Her eighth book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric (Wolsak and Wynn, Buckrider Books, 2021), was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. Her sixth poetry collection, The Celery Forest, was named a CBC Best Book of the Year. She is the author of two novels; her award-winning debut Quarry (Two Wolves Press, 2017) and The Most Cunning Heart (Palimpsest Press, 2022).
Frances Boyle
Frances Boyle is the author of several works of poetry and fiction, including Skin Hunger, a novel (forthcoming, Guernica Editions, 2026), Openwork and Limestone, poetry (Frontenac House, 2022) and Seeking Shade, short stories (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020). Her debut 2014 poetry collection, Light-carved Passages, was republished in 2024 by Doubleback Books.
Raised on the prairies, Frances has long made Ottawa home. Her latest poetry collection, Openwork and LImework speaks to the rituals of contemporary women as seen through the lens of Celtic warrior queens and goddesses. The collection turns both inward and outward at the same time, telling our collective human story, so it feels like our own, using the natural world as a source of women’s strength - showcasing both the beauty and the brutality.
Murgatroyd Monaghan
Murgatroyd Monaghan is an Autistic mother, writer, spoken word artist, and poet of mixed descent. She won PRISM International’s Pacific Poetry Prize in 2024 and Wordstock’s annual Poetry Slam in 2023, and was recently longlisted for CBC’s nonfiction prize. She was also a finalist for Room’s Nonfiction contest, the Freefall annual prose contest, and the Conger Beasly Jr. Award for Nonfiction. Her latest book, published earlier this year, "White Spaces Where We Learn to Breathe", uses space, text, and punctuation as social commentary. The Poems are designed to flow in a way that helps readers to question their own thoughts and feelings of superiority, belonging, and purpose using language, punctuation, and white spaces tools as they ask themselves, what is poetry, what is language, and who designed my ideas about this?
Laurie Koensgen
Laurie Koensgen is a writer and educator based in Ottawa. Her poetry invites audiences into both the tender and the outrage. A recent poem published in Pinhole Poetry examines her relationship with her children as they leave and return home into their adulthood. She brings us into the quiet calm of her home, evoking memories of a time now gone. Her work, both as a poet and an educator, is driven by her desire for change, saying that it is a tool to use: “when extremists censor metaphors, dictate imagery and work to destroy imagination.” Her poetry poetry has recently appeared in Rust & Moth, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Moon Review, The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Her fourth chapbook, this clingstone love, was recently published by Pinhole Poetry. She is a founding member of the Ruby Tuesday Writing Group, a poetry collective that has been meeting weekly since 2006.
Rebecca Diem
Our Emcee, Rebecca Diem writes hopeful speculative fiction and poetry. Her work can be found on Reactor, On the Bay, and Write Magazine, and she is the author of the indie steampunk series Tales of the Captain Duke. She is the Owen Sound Poet Laureate for 2024-2025 with a mandate to celebrate collaboration, known for her ephemeral live events in which the audience is invited to be co-creators.
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