Jennifer Still is Winnipeg’s fourth Poet Laureate, holding the position for 2025 and 2026. Still’s poetic practice reimagines what a page can be and how a poem can be experienced. She pierces, types, and illuminates her pages into sparking, embodied languages of home.
Jennifer Still scratched her first poems with gravel in the back alley of Girdwood Crescent, an East Kildonan rowhouse community in Winnipeg where she grew up. She is the author of four poetry books, Comma, Girlwood, and Saltations and the long poem legs, winner of the Malahat Review long poem prize and now an award-winning video collaboration with fellow Winnipeg artists Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau. Deeply committed to artistic process and community, Still has served as a mentor and editor to writers and poets across Canada. Her poetry has received the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry, Manitoba’s Most Promising Writer Award and The Prairie Fire BanO Centre/Bliss Carman Prize for Poetry.
Still composes poems with physicality in the Red River Valley, Treaty 1 territory, homeland of the Métis Nation. Her poetic practice reimagines what a page can be and how a poem can be experienced. She pierces, types, and illuminates her pages into sparking, embodied languages of home.
Still’s poetry is informed by physical labour and the beauty of being. In an interview with the Manitoba Arts Council, Still states:
“I like expanding my sense of a page to see how much it can hold— not only words, but materials, seeds, shadows, pinholes, collage. I make poems that have a tactile, physical element to their composition, poems that leave a muddy fingerprint on the page. My writing practice is filled with motion, exposed to the elements, tuned to the natural world, and my interior voice. […] I am locating the poem, like never before, in my body.”
As Poet Laureate, Still says one of her hopes is to “promote poetry as a tangible, practical, even crafty, form of expression accessible to all”. With her unique approach to poetic form, Still aims to create conversations around poetry as a physical performance piece. She believes that “a poem is not limited to existing on a page” and hopes that her unconventional poetry mediums will evoke emotions and interest even from those who have not had much exposure to the wonderful world of written word.
“I want to expand the definition of what poetry is and how it can be experienced,” says Still, “Poetry is not somewhere out there away from us. Poetry is our lives. It's being curious about who we are and where we are and what is right here before us. And then to make something of it. I'm excited to inspire others to discover their personal and particular voice in this city that has shaped mine.”
Find out about previous Winnipeg Poets Laureate at www.winnipegarts.ca/poetlaureate.
