by Sarah Onyango
On Sunday, April 19, 2015, the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of Ottawa (IFCO) presented an evening with the filmmaker and poet Shane Book, at the Mercury Lounge. This event featured two of Shane Book’s most recent films, a few of his poems and a conversation facilitated by Adrian Harewood (CBC Ottawa). There were also performances by vocalists and musicians Yaa-Hemaa Obiri-Yeboah and Angelique Francis as well as music by DJ Trevor Walker as well as delicious East African cuisine provided by Sambusa Village.
Shane Book was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Ottawa -where he attended Merivale High School. He was educated at the University of Western Ontario; the University of Victoria; New York University; Temple University; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, he received an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. Shane has just been appointed Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he will help launch the university’s new MFA program.
Mr. Book has also received widespread acclaim as a poet. His first collection of poetry Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press, 2010) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. His most recent collection, Congotronic, was a Kuhl House Poets Series Selection, chosen for inclusion in The Best American Experimental Writing 2015, and named a “New and Notable Book” by Poets and Writers Magazine. Congotronic was published in 2014 by the University of Iowa Press and in Canada by House of Anansi Press.
Shane’s writing has appeared in more than twenty anthologies and over seventy magazines in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. His other honors include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from the Telluride Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar and a National Magazine Award. His award-winning films have been screened at festivals and on television around the world.
