Erina Harris

Erina Harris writes, teaches, serves as a freelance editor, and as a mentor to early-stage writers. Her work has been published internationally, and in translation. She has received numerous prizes for her writing, teaching, and activism. Her hybrid writing projects (poetics, essays) engage traditional and experimental forms, as part of broader socio-political meditations.

A graduate and Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she completed her Ph.D. and Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Creative Writing and Pedagogy at the University of Calgary. Her first book of poetry, The Stag Head Spoke was short-listed for the Canadian Authors’ Association Poetry Award. Her second book, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead (poetry and lyric essays) will be published in North America, Fall 2024. This new work engages storytelling traditions such as nonsense verse, fairy tales, and the absurd to imagine increasingly ethical relations with the self, human others, and ecology.

For a decade, Erina Harris curated and hosted the Blue Betty Reading Series, Guerilla Events in the Arts & Letters, including the yearly Cowgirl Shindig International Women’s Day Reading Salon and fundraiser for local women’s shelters. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta with a concentration in anti-racist and innovative pedagogies. Her latest research-creation project is an emerging book of lyric essays that explores histories of misogyny, homophobia, racism and resilience, through the study of children’s dolls, primarily those of North America 1800 – present.

Erina Harris is a marvelous writing talent with tremendous potential and stellar work ethic. Her artistic work is complex and important: it reflects engagement with traditional poetry and also original, foundational work in contemporary poetics.

Suzette Mayr, Professor Department of English University of Calgary