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The City of Winnipeg has a new poet laureate for 2025-2025.
The Winnipeg Arts Council announced that award-winning writer Jennifer Still will be assuming the role. Still succeeds Chimwemwe Undi as the fourth poet laureate since the Winnipeg Arts Council launched the program back in 2018.
“It does feel like an honour,” said Still in an interview on Morning Light, while simultaneously acknowledging the responsibility that comes with the role.
“My poetic practice has been one that’s filled with solitude and reflection and selective collaboration, but I feel like this huge opening – like, I’m about to collaborate with the entire city of Winnipeg!”
While that responsibility could be seen as daunting to some, the possibilities of the role and of the medium of poetry are both motivators for Still. “To me, Winnipeg is a city that is constantly on the verge of possible... maybe not always fully made, always verging,” she explains, “and poetry is, I think, about what is possible on the page and what is possible to be a page and what is possible to do with that space.”
The notion that any space can hold poetry is something that Still has observed since she first starting writing poetry as a child growing up in East Kildonan. Rather than turn to the pen and page, Still would carve poetry into the city itself with gravel. This practice of incorporating her poems into the world around her and vice versa continues to this day, using everything from muddy fingerprints on the page to perforating the page with pinholes so that light can literally shine through her words.
“Poetry is in conversations and interactions,” Still explains, noting that as we are constantly in dialogue with the physical world around us as much as we are in dialogue with one another, her work becomes choosing which conversations to include in her work. “It can’t be everything, but it can be some things.”
Some things that Still will be pursuing as the poet laureate will be reading at municipal functions including select city council meetings and the mayor’s annual luncheon. Still will also be creating her latest poetry collection called The Little Book of Light, which is a continuation of her working perforating her words with pinholes to infuse light into her poems.
“I feel like I will be taking bigger risks,” Still says when asked about how being the poet laureate will affect her day-to-day craft. “I just think the daily practice and feeling a sense of audience will raise me. It already is.”