In LOCAL HEROES, Penn Kemp celebrates legendary cultural heroes from London Ontario. These poems evoke a specific city in its particular landscape and history. Kemp documents London's literary and artistic heritage in honouring artists in fields ranging from visual through the word to figure skating. Presented as an overview, the collection stretches from Victoria explorer Teresa Harris to the contemporary arts scene. Local Heroes acknowledges the Indigenous peoples here, and the ongoing waves of settlers who have called the area home, as London grows from colonial outpost to vibrant cultural centre. Local Heroes spans time but remains in place.

Activist poet, performer and playwright, Penn Kemp, M.Ed., is a League of Canadian Poets Life Member and winner of their 2015 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Spoken Word Artist of the Year award. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate for London, Ontario, with twenty-six books of poetry and drama published; six plays and ten CDs produced as well as award-winning videopoems. As Writer-in-Residence for Western University, her project was the DVD, Luminous Entrance: a Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, Pendas Productions. Penn has performed and published her work world-wide, often as writer-in residence in Canada, Brazil, New York and India. Her "poem for peace in many voices" has been translated into 136 languages and performed around the world. Her latest works are two anthologies for the Feminist Caucus Archives of the League of Canadian Poets: Performing Women and Women and Multimedia. Forthcoming is a new play, The Triumph of Teresa Harris.

Penn Kemp's profile page