Long

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor from Boston who lives in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish people. Her poetry collections are Trauma Head (2018), a chapbook of the same name (Otter Press, 2017), and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), all of which have been nominated for national awards. In September 2019 she launched the anthology Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Anvil Press) which is a sibling book to Trauma Head and was a finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and Hoffer Grand Prize in the US. Her first book, V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012) coedited with John Asfour, was a City of Vancouver Book Award finalist and reflects her work with Thursdays Writing Collective, a beloved non-profit organization she founded and for which she edited and published nine anthologies. She is also the author of Watcher, a chapbook of visual and video poems from Sweden’s Timglaset Editions, with Gary Barwin. Elee is a director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program that pairs writers with mentors, and is a co-founder of the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award. She holds an MA in Hispanic Studies from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Elee is active in community-based initiatives and is on the advisory board of the Andover Bread Loaf Program which promotes literacy and educational revitalization through the lens of social justice in the most under-resourced communities and school systems around the world, particularly in US urban communities and public schools. She also does poetry outreach visits in Canadian classrooms through Poetry In Voice. eleekg.com

Medium (French)

Elee Kraljii Gardiner est une mentore en création, poète et éditrice établie à Vancouver. Elle a publié le recueil de poèmes Trauma Head (2018), une brochure sous le même titre (Otter Press, 2017), le recueil serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), et dirigé les collectifs Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Anvil Press, 2019) et V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012). Elle a fondé l’organisation à but non lucratif réputée Thursdays Writing Collective, où elle a dirigé neuf collectifs depuis dix ans. Elle est directrice de Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.

Short

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and the editor of the anthologies V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Against Death: 35 Essays on Living. Originally from Boston, she lives in Vancouver where she co-directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.

Awards and Notables

• Trauma Head was awarded the 2019 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellent in Poetry and nominated for the 2018 Raymond Souster Award. It was a CBC “Most Anticipated” book and named as one of the Best Books of 2019 by The White Review.
• Against Death was a finalist for the Hoffer Grand Prize, the 2019 Montaigne Medal(both from the US) and is one of BookWarehouse’s “Best Books of the Year”.
• The handmade medical file chapbook, Trauma Head (Otter Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award in 2018 and the 2015 Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.
• serpentine loop was one of CBC’s  “most anticipated spring releases,” of 2016, was named to three “Best of” lists of the year in Canada as well as shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award.
• V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award.
• Each title went into second printing within its first year.
• Elee’s efforts to foster writers earned the 2015 Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. She is also the recipient of CV2’s Lina Chartrand Award in 2011 and in 2014 was a finalist for Malahat’s Far Horizons Prize.

Extra Background

Elee’s writing is published in places including Hunger Mountain, TCR, Event, PRISM International, Lemonhound.com. Her poem “Doppelgänger” was the first poem published in Harvard Medicine Journal in more than 40 years. Visual poems appear in Streetcake, Osmosis and To Call. She is a contributor to several anthologies such as ForceField (Mother Tongue), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press), Enpipe Line (Creekstone), Alive at the Centre (Ooligan Press), Sustenance (Anvil Press), Gush (Frontenac), Ghost Fishing (Split This Rock) and Sweetwater:Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press). Elee’s essay “On Immigration” received Best of the Net 2017 from All Lit Up. Her work has been translated into French, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish.

Elee is on the advisory board of the Andover Breadloaf Project and for many years was on the editorial board of Poetry is Dead. She was a member of the Advisory Council of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and has served twice on the City of Vancouver Book Award jury. She is a founding member of CWILA (Canadian Women in Literary Arts) and a two-time member of their Critic in Residence jury. She was a Poetry Ambassador for Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose and currently works as a mentor and director at Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is a manuscript assessor for presses and conducts interviews and reviews for several publications.

Contact at eleethursdays (at) gmail.com and Twitter at @eleekg

High-Res Photos

Here are high res photos for events or posters. All photo credits Paul Joseph. Click for full size.