"OFFICIAL" BIOGRAPHY:

Kyeren Regehr is the author of Cult Life (Pedlar Press, 2020), shortlisted for the ReLit Awards and the Victoria Butler Book Prize. Her new collection, Disassembling A Dancer, is the winner of the Raven Chapbook Award. She earned her MFA in Writing at the University of Victoria, and spent several years on the poetry board of Canada's iconic literary periodical, The Malahat Reveiw. Kyeren has twice received writing grants from Canada Council for the Arts; her work has been published in anthologies and periodicals in Canada, Australia, and the U.S.A.


SLIGHTLY MORE PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY:

Although I was born and raised in Australia, I grew up as a writer in Canada. My influences are poets like Dione Brand, John Thomspon, Tim Lilburn, Anne Simpson and Patrick Lane, to name a small few. I enjoy being challenged and expanded by the work of writers from around the world, but the (mostly) Canadian poets I absorbed during my university years largely shaped my internal poetic landscape. I'm deeply grateful to Canadian poetry.
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Poetry is how I process my inner world, and how I respond to the outer world. If you've read Cult Life, you may have noticed that it's largely memoir, and I do see much of my poetry as a record of my life. But I also use poetry as a way to explore art and nature, myth and spirituality, and my relationship to these things. It seems to me that poetry is a blueprint of the consciousness, or a distillation of human thinking and experience, at any given time in history. And nowadays, with the planet in crisis, and social media eating up large portions of our lives, it feels more important than ever to write poetry--poets are record keepers, visionaries, radicals, close and careful watchers of the natural world, and of the human world... I think all artists are, but I like talking about poets. :)


In Disassembling A Dancer, I dive into the dark side of the ballet world, the body as art, and art as identity. But at its heart, this small book is a story in poetry. While I find a sense of release and much needed mental reconfiguration in anti-narrative forms like ghazals, I'm probably a story-teller before anything else, and thus my projects are usually narrative. I've been working on a story-based project about the Arthurian legends for some time, and another more personal quasi-narrative collection about motherhood and spirituality.