Lisa Robertson & Mia You

Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, art writer and novelist currently living in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver, where in the early nineties she began writing, publishing and collaborating in a community of artists and poets that included Artspeak Gallery, the Western Front, and the Kootenay School of Writing.

Since then, she has published nine books of poetry, three books of essays and one novel, as well as contributing to many artist’s catalogues, monographs and magazines. Her current work includes a novel-in-progress on the Bièvre, a Parisian undergrounded industrial river.

For the past ten years she has been immersed in a long-term study called wide rime, exploring by means of translation, annotation and performance the poetics of medieval troubadour poetry, from the region of France where she lives, in relationship to innovations in social and linguistic form and de-colonial subjectivity. Her book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, an extensively annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of this study.

She travels often as an invited lecturer, reader and teacher to universities, art schools and community arts groups across Europe, Canada and the USA, and has held residencies at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Princeton, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart Institute, and Cambridge in this capacity.

In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018, the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry. In 2021 Coach House Books published her long poem Boat, and her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in Canada.

Mia You

Mia You is author of the poetry collection I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and the chapbook Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Other writing has appeared in Artforum, Los Angeles Review of Books and The European Review of Books, as well as ELH and Textual Practice.

She currently teaches at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. She is also working on a three-year Dutch Research Council-funded project titled Poetry in the Age of Global English.