Emily Pohl-Weary

Emily Pohl-Weary (born 1973)

Literary career Pohl-Weary's second collection of poems, Ghost Sick: A Poetry of Witness won the 2016 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Canada's Parliamentary Poet George Elliott Clarke reviewed it thusly in the Halifax Chronicle: "Like Holocaust witness poet Paul Celan, Pohl-Weary checks tabloids, billboards, newsflashes, for the language to bespeak domesticated violence."

Her biography of her grandmother Judith Merril, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril (Between the Lines Books), won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book in 2003 and was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award.

Pohl-Weary's first novel, A Girl Like Sugar, was published by McGilligan Books in 2004. Her most recent book is the young adult novel Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl (2013), about a musician who gets bitten by a vicious dog in Central Park and finds herself changing in unusual ways.

In 2008, she founded the Toronto Street Writers, a free writing group for inner-city youth in the neighbourhood where she grew up. For three years, she led a weekly writing workshop for residents of Sagatay (Na-Me-Res), a long-term transitional home for First Nations, Metis and Inuit men in Toronto. Her writing workshops focus on writing skills, creative empowerment, learning tools for conflict-resolution, and drawing out participants' unique voices and stories.

For eight years, Pohl-Weary published and wrote for Kiss Machine magazine, which ceased publication in 2008. She is also a former editor of Broken Pencil magazine. In October 2022, Pohl-Weary released the audio drama The Witch's Circle, based on Russian folklore, as part of Odyssey Theatre's podcast series The Other Path.

Books

Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, Merrill and Pohl-Weary (Between the Lines Books, 2002),