Joanne Epp : part one

Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Joanne Epp has published poetry in literary journals including The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Canadian Literature. Her first book, Eigenheim, earned her a nomination for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Married with two sons, she spent several years in Ontario and now makes her home in Winnipeg. Cattail Skyline is Joanne’s second book.

Photo credit: Anthony Mark Photography

What are you working on?

For quite a while I’ve been working on a series of poems based on letters and diaries written by my grandmother and great-grandmother, and I hope to actually have a manuscript to show for it some day. This year, with prompting from Ariel Gordon’s workshop series, I’ve also been paying particularly close attention to the slow process of winter moving into spring—the snow diminishing, the changing light, the returning birds—and have been writing about that.