Lunch Poems presents Conyer Clayton & Tolu Oloruntoba (Online)

January's online Lunch Poems reading features poets Conyer Clayton & Tolu Oloruntoba.

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer, editor, musician and arts educator born in Kentucky now living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land (Ottawa). Her multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, the climate crisis and gendered violence through a surrealist lens. She is the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020, winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks, most recently, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot Press, 2022) written collaboratively with VII, a poetry collective of which she is a member. She works as the non-fiction editor for untethered magazine and the social media assistant for Canthius.

Tolu Oloruntoba's poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Entropy, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for health authorities in British Columbia. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, while his debut chapbook, Manubrium, was a bpNichol Chapbook Award finalist. The Junta of Happenstance, his first full-length collection, was the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Poetry and the Canadian winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver area, where he lives with his family.