ST@NZ@ League's Electronic Newsletter

August 2009

NEWS FROM NEW BRUNSWICK AND PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
By Kathy Mac. Travis Lane’s poem “The Confluence”, which appeared in Prairie Fire, has been selected for the anthology The Best Canadian Poetry in 2009.

matt robinson’s long poem 'Against the Hard Angle,' which won the Malahat Long Poem prize this year is coming out as a chapbook from Vernon, BC's Greenboathouse Press this fall. He also has a poem being painted on a traffic control box in the Grand Parade in downtown Halifax, the inaugural instance of public poetry in the city. Finally, he has a new full-length collection coming out from ECW Press in Spring 2010. For full report click here.

NEWS FROM THE FEMINIST CAUCUS
By Anne Burke, Chair. In this country, women and girls are supposedly autonomous individuals, free to live their lives as they please. It is shocking to read that, in a given year in Canada, 11 percent of women suffer physical abuse by their partners and 25 percent of female undergraduates experience some form of sexual abuse. Domestic violence is endemic within Canadian society.  Social factors impact this abuse, from employment and gender equity to housing and childcare, and need to be considered in context.  Short-term and long-term policies required to deal with this issue are evaluated in Violence Against Women in Canada (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Walter Dekeseredy, who is an award-winning Professor of Criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.  A related issue is the fact that the Canadian House of Commons unanimously passed an all-party resolution to eliminate poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000. For full report click here.