This is a video of Ann Graham Walker’s SICA ZoomMuse Poems for Peace poetry reading held on 19 May 2022. This event is part of a monthly (third Thursday) series of ZoomMuse Poems for Peace poetry readings, co-sponsored by SICA-USA and SICA Canada. See the link with the Zoom information here. Ann is a remarkable poet with incredibly global life experience. Her recent poems for Ukraine are very powerful. Her poems for peace are not limited to the current conflict in Ukraine, but touch on the gender war and other catastrophes.

Ann currently lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. “Currently” because she has previously lived on Canada’s east coast for a long period of time. Before that she lived in Poughkeepsie, New York as an undergraduate at Vassar College and then in Davis, California, where she got an MA in European History at the University of California.

Ann also, more recently, has an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College’s Port Townsend campus. She lived in Latin America until she was nine — in Cuba, Mexico and Argentina (speaking Spanish before English) and then in Australia until she was 18.

Ann’s poetry was first published in a Nova Scotia literary magazine – Voices Down East – in her 20’s, and in the Gaspereau Review a few years later. But she only began taking poetry seriously when she moved to BC in 2002 and started studying with Canadian master poet Patrick Lane and with Betsy Warland.

Ann has been published in a number of literary magazines, including Prism and Arc, she’s been included in anthologies – including Caitlin Press’s tree anthology that just came out, “Worth More Standing”, and has been a finalist in the Malahat Open Season, the Prism Poetry Prize and the Fiddlehead Review Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, the Puzzle at the End of Love, was published by Leaf Press in 2012. Ann is currently finishing the novel that was her Goddard MFA thesis – “You With No Country”. But she continues to write poetry as a member of Paul Nelson’s poetry writing community and the Turtle Island Tertulia.