Sonia Halpern will be the featured poet at the May 1st London Open Mic Poetry NIght at Mykonos Restaurant,  starting at 6:30.

Born in Hamilton, Ms Halpern attended UWO and Queen’s in Kingston. She is an art historian who has taught at Western since 1990. Sonia teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research and in the Department of Visual Arts, and has won three major teaching awards at Western, including the recent 2012 Arts & Humanities Teaching Excellence Award. She has also been voted one of Western’s most “Popular Profs” by the Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities for five consecutive years (2000-2005). Sonia is very active in the London community as a published author, local theatrical actor, and musical composer. Her book, The Life and Times of Transition Girl (South Western Ontario Poetry, 2005), is her first published collection of poetry, and has been dubbed “Dorothy Parker meets ‘Sex and the City.’”

The interviewer is Stan Burfield, London Open Mic Poetry Night organizer.

Burfield:     Why did you start writing poems that January morning in 2002? What caused that initial impulse? Did you have a relative who wrote poems?

Tom Cull will be a featured poet at London Open Mic Poetry Night’s special April 24th event in celebration of National Poetry Month. He will read along with celebrated Canadian poet Frank Davey, followed by Q&A and an open mic, at Landon Library in London’s Wortley Village, beginning at 6:30.

Tom Cull was born and raised in rural Southwestern Ontario. He is on the board of Poetry London and is a co-facilitator of their poetry workshop. Tom holds a PhD in English Literature from York University and is an adjunct professor at the Centre for American Studies at Western University. Tom created and runs Thames River Rally, a volunteer group that meets monthly to clean up garbage in and along the Thames River. His first book of poetry, What the Badger Said, will be published by Baseline Press in September 2013.

The interviewer is Stan Burfield, organizer of London Open Mic Poetry Night. 
   
Burfield:    When and why did you begin writing poetry?

Strathroy resident Frank Davey grew up in BC and studied at UBC where in 1961 he co-founded with George Bowering and Fred Wah the influential and contentious poetry newsletter TISH. His first volume of poetry, in 1962, was described as ‘the act of the moment’ rather than poetry as the commonplace attempt 'to express  feelings.' In 1965 he launched the avant-garde poetry and criticism journal Open Letter, and, with the assistance of bpNichol, developed it into what many still see as Canada's most important forum for discussion and examination of innovative and experimental ideas and texts. 

Davey obtained his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1968. With the encouragement of George Woodcock, he began writing literary criticism, a body of work from the 1970s to the ‘90s which would be described as 'the most individual and influential ever written in Canada.'