Susan McCaslin will be one of two featured poets at the exciting May 7th London Open Mic Poetry Night at Mykonos Restaurant. She will be co-featuring with Lee Johnson. Both are touring their new collections. The crowd will be warmed up by rising local singing/songwriting star Carly Thomas. And a large contingent of open-mic poets will step up to fill out the evening.



Susan McCaslin is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including her new one, The Disarmed Heart (The St. Thomas Poetry Series, May 2014), poems on the roots of violence and of peace-making. She is Faculty Emeritus of Douglas College in Westminster, BC, where she taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-three years.  

Laurence Hutchman is one of two featured poets at London Open Mic Poetry Night`s special April 16th event in celebration of National Poetry Month. (Penn Kemp is the other feature.) The reading will be at the Landon Branch Library in Wartley Village, not the usual Mykonos Restaurant venue. 

LAURENCE HUTCHMAN, of Oakville, is a recently retired English professor, having taught for 22 years at the University of Moncton. Earlier, Hutchman applied himself for years in London, earning a degree in English at UWO. In the 1970s he also organized a poetry reading series in London, and had his first book of poetry published here. So far, Hutchman has seven books of poetry to his credit. 

Laurence Hutchman was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1948. He finished his BA in English in The University of Western Ontario in 1972, received his MA at Concordia University in 1979; and his Ph.D at the Université de Montréal in 1988. He has taught at a number of universities including Concordia University, the University of Alberta, The University of Western Ontario, and The Université de Moncton where he is currently a Full Professor. He was President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick from 2000-2002. He has given many readings and workshops in Canada, the United States, China, Ireland and Bulgaria.  His awards include: the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts, 2007; and First Prize, Poetry Category in the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick Literary Competition, as well as others. He currently lives with his partner Eva Kolacz in Oakville.

Penn Kemp is one of two featured poets at London Open Mic Poetry Night`s special April 16th event in celebration of National Poetry Month. (Stay tuned for the interview and poems of our second feature, Laurence Hutchman.) The reading will be at the Landon Branch Library in Wartley Village, not the usual Mykonos Restaurant venue. 

Penn Kemp will be launching her latest collection, from Dream Sequins,  at the reading.  A batch of her poems from the chapbook follow the interview below. As do details of the event.

Penn Kemp, a native of Strathroy and raised in London, has been heralded by The Writers’ Union as “a one-woman literary industry”. A poet, activist, performer, playwright and editor, Kemp was UWO`s writer-in-residence in 2009-10 and the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of London in 2010-12. She received the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Award for contributions to Canadian arts and culture.