Welcome to a special edition of The Interruption. Today and for the next few episodes we will be featuring interviews with and readings by the Canadian poets who have been shortlisted for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

Today I’m speaking with Shane Book, who is an award-winning poet and filmmaker. He was educated at the University of Victoria, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His writing has appeared in more than twenty anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry. Shane’s most recent book of poems, Congotronic, is published by House of Anansi Press and is shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Interruption is a 49th Shelf–Books on the Radio collaboration in which I interview Canadian writers about the surprising things that inform, inspire, and even interrupt their creative process.

Thanks to our friends at the Griffin Poetry Prize for being so helpful in arranging these interviews.

The first podcast is my conversation with Shane, and in the second, Shane reads from Congotronic.

*****