Working groups list: The Olive

The Olive Reading Series

Olive's Regular Poetry Readings

An evening of intense poetry, politics and discussion
Second Tuesday of every month (Sept to April)
Location: Hulbert's 7601 115 St (Belgravia)
Free admission and an open mic to follow for new poets.

The readings will start at 7:00 pm

 

About the Olive
The Olive is a non-profit editorial collective that was established by students and former students at the University of Alberta in 2000 in order to provide a regular and consistent forum for poetry in Edmonton. The Olive is a reading and zine series that holds monthly poetry readings from September to April. Each reading focuses on the work of one poet, who reads for roughly 30-40 minutes; an open stage, where anyone in attendance is welcome to read their own or someone else's poetry, concludes every reading.

Furthermore, for each reading we also publish a small zine that contains 6-8 pages of the featured reader's poetry. We distribute this zine, free of charge, at the reading and to other people who have expressed interest in receiving it.

Our goal is to highlight the work of both local poets and poets from the rest of the country. In addition to readers from Edmonton, Calgary, and Red Deer, we've also had readers from Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Toronto. Moreover, since we want to help younger/newer poets get experience reading and sharing their writing, we have made one reading per year (this year it will be our February reading) a reading when members of an upper-year undergraduate creative writing class from the University of Alberta will be our featured poets.

Our current mandate is to continue with monthly poetry readings, where we present local and visiting, established and emerging, poets. We also will continue with our practice of putting out a small zine for each reading, as well as publishing two full-fledged chapbooks each year.

With the help of APIRG, we've been able to realize three goals for The Olive:

  • we have substantial funding to continue preparing the monthly zine (before, the members of the editorial staff had to fund the zine out of their own pockets).
  • we are now able to pay our featured readers an honorarium.
  • we have been able to expand our publications by becoming a poetry chapbook press. Our plan is to release two chapbooks per year; ideally with one established poet and one emerging poet for each set.