Events › Crafting a Poem with Terence Young

Come join award-winning writer and educator Terence Young for an evening of poetic practice and learning. Terence will read from his own new work and teach attendees core principles of writing poetically and writing precise, crafted poetry. 

Celebrate National Poetry Month with a Creative Writing Class at VPL. This class is supported by the Canadian Poetry Fund, a local donor-advised fund which fosters accessible public education outreach for poetry and other forms of creative writing

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Terence Young lives in Victoria, B.C., where he has recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is a co-founder of The Claremont Review (1992), an international literary journal for young writers that has, after 25 years of service to the writing community, sadly closed its doors. His first book of poetry, The Island in Winter, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published several books: a collection of stories, Rhymes With Useless, which was one of two runners-up for the annual Danuta Gleed award; a novel, After Goodlake's, which received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2005; and a second collection of poetry, Moving Day, which was nominated for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2006. In 2008, he was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence, an honour shared with fifteen other teachers from across Canada that year. A second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age, was released from Biblioasis Press in the spring of 2010. A story from that collection, "That Time of Year," was included in Oberon Press's edition of Best Canadian Stories 11 (2012). More recently (2019), he received a National Magazine Award (Silver) for his poem "The Bear,” and “Tender Is the Night” won The New Quarterly’s annual occasional verse contest the following year. His third collection of poetry, Smithereens, came out in March, 2021, and his third collection of short fiction, Give Us This Day, is now out from Signature Editions.