Admission: In advance via Tickets Please or pay-what-you-can at the door
Almonte Readers & Writers is pleased to invite you to delve ~ In close conversation with writers, as part of the 2025 Lanark Lit Festival of Writing.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, join us for a candid conversation between Dagne Forrest and Carolyn Smart. Both award-winning local poets, Dagne and Carolyn will each read their work and speak about how they came to writing poetry, the craft of writing and the topics that they continue to come back to in their poems.
Both bringing in the visceral themes of the body, motherhood, and the natural world, Dagne and Carolyn write poems that illuminate what it means to be human.
With plenty of opportunity for audience participation, the poets will take turns asking each other questions about their work and relationship with writing, and will answer questions from those attending. Each will also share their poetry with the audience, reading select pieces. We look forward to welcoming you to this event.
Community ASL interpretation provided.
About delve events:
Hosted in café settings, delve events are intended to be less formal and more intimate than traditional guest author interviews. Premised as a conversation between two writers that have something in common, delve events offer a chance for writers to get-to-know each other and explore their similarities and differences, while giving audiences the opportunity to engage with writers whose work they may, or may not, already be familiar with.
About the writers:
Dagne Forrest is an award-winning writer based in Almonte, Ontario. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. In 2023 she won the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest run by The New Quarterly (Canada).
In 2025, she was one of eight finalists selected by US poet Maggie Smith for the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize run by december magazine. Her first chapbook “Un / Becoming” has just been published by Baseline Press (2025).
More about Dagne can be found by visiting www.dagneforrest.com
Carolyn Smart is the author of an award-winning memoir and seven collections of poetry,
including “Hooked” and “Careen”. She is a freelance editor, founder of the RBC Bronwen
Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in South Frontenac, Ontario. For more than three decades she was Director of Creative Writing at Queen’s University.
More about Carolyn can be found by visiting www.carolynsmartediting.ca
The 2025 Lanark Lit Festival of Writing is presented by Almonte Readers & Writers thanks to the generous funding support of Lanark County, the Municipality of Mississippi Mills, the Perth & District Community Foundation, and the Elizabeth Kelly Library Foundation, with community partnership from the Mississippi Mills Public Library, the Perth & District Public Library, Mill Street Books, Almonte Writers Guild, and with the community support of Equator Coffee, OVC Almonte, Jazzy’s Brewhaus and other local partners
