Sudbury's Poets Laureate

Vera Constantineau lives in Copper Cliff. She sat as poet laureate during the pandemic, from March 2020 to April 2022. Due to the COVID-19 situation it became immediately obvious she would have to approach the role in ways that differed greatly to previous laureates for the city. With her previously established network of haiku poets available to her, she decided to create a podcast. The PL Pod invited the world of poetry to come to Greater Sudbury. Twenty-four podcasts later, she signed off for the last time. She claims the podcast as one of her favorite parts of the role and considers it central to her legacy. In addition, the shelf of haiku related materials held within the library system represents a second level of legacy. Her hope was to build a resource base that anyone who expressed an interest in the Japanese forms of poetry could access.

Vera is best known for her focus on Japanese forms of poetry; however she also writes short fiction, nonfiction and humour. She holds memberships in good standing with Haiku Canada, where she was recently made the Ontario Regional Representative, the Haiku Society of America, The Writers’ Union of Canada, the Sudbury Writers’ Guild and NOWW Thunder Bay Writers. Vera is the creator of three lines at a time, a haiku chapbook published in late 2019, as well as, the author of Enlightened by Defilement available through local bookstores and from Latitude 46 Publishing.

Chloé LaDuchesse is the author of two books of poetry, Exosquelette (2021; Trillium Award winner, poetry category. 2022; finalist for the Governor General's Award, poetry category, 2021) and Furies (2017; finalist for the Trillium Award, poetry category, 2018), published by Mémoire d'encrier. She has also published a roman noir, L'incendiaire de Sudbury, with Héliotrope (2022). She has written for several magazines, including Estuaire, Le Sabord, Exit, Moebius and Open Minds Quarterly, as well as for collective collections of short stories and poetry. 

On stage or online, she has been heard in the Manifesto project at Place des arts du Grand Sudbury, at the Nuit sur l'étang, in the podcast Le Mot Bruit and in some fifty activities and performances at various fairs and festivals. Zines are another art form she enjoys, having published over a dozen of them and organized three editions of the Expozine Sudbury zine fair. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Greater Sudbury and as such hosted a weekly bilingual poetry program on CKLU for two years.

Kim Fahner has been writing her entire life, but only seriously writing and publishing poetry since her early twenties. She has had her poems and short stories published over the past 20 years, along with three books: You Must Imagine The Cold Here (Scrivener Press, 1997), braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001) and The Narcoleptic Madonna (Penumbra Press, 2012). Her short story Visitation was published in Along the 46th, an anthology of short fiction released by Latitude 46 Publishing in November 2015.

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). Kim is the First Vice Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada, a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Her first novel, The Donoghue Girl, is being published by Latitude 46 in Spring 2024. Kim is currently working on her second novel. She may be reached at her author website.

Thomas Leduc’s family has lived in the City of Greater Sudbury for five generations. He was Poet Laureate from 2014-16 and served as the President of The Sudbury Writers’ Guild from 2017-21. As Poet Laureate Tom put poetry on city buses and ran a youth poetry group. He has also put poetry on city hiking trails and for the last several years has been a judge for Open Quarterly Magazine’s annual “BrainStorm” poetry contest. He’s performed at the Gore Bay Jazz festival, Northern Lights Festival Boreal and on the CBC radio. He’s been published in numerous anthologies and magazines.

In 2018, Tom published his premier book of poetry with Latitude 46 publishing, Slagflower Poems Unearthed From A Mining Town. While being president of the Sudbury Writers’ Guild Tom led an inspirational community project on Canada’s largest mural, painted on the former Sudbury General Hospital, titled “Painted Voices” and now he is project manager for a similar book on the Sudbury Surperstack. Tom plans on releasing his second collection of poetry in the coming years. You can find his books or learn more about his work on his home site.

Daniel Aubin has participated actively in the Sudbury arts scene ever since he first climbed on stage as part of Collège Notre Dame theatre troupe Les fous du Roy (1996-2000). He honed his skills while working toward a BFA in Theatre at Laurentian University (Cum Laude. 2004). Soon after, he cofounded the short-lived FFF collective and published a book of poetry, Plasticité, with les Éditions Prise de Parole (2004). He launched this same book by performing it in its entirety at the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario in a performance poetry show. Daniel contributed lyrics to the songs of Konflit Dramatik and lent his voice to recordings of two of the band’s songs: Words Fail and Tête de poisson. In 2005, he acted in Exits: a coproduction between the TNO and Théâtre la Catapulte.

Daniel continued performing his poetry live, notably in the Sudbury Blues show and a series of super-poetic battles organized by the Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario. After working for two years as the director of the Grand Ciel Bleu bookstore in downtown Sudbury, he took to the stage once more in a production of Les Roger at the TNO (2011). Daniel now works as a journalist for the weekly francophone newspaper Le Voyageur and continues to rework the manuscript for his second book of poetry.

Roger Nash’s most recent fiction appears in the PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2009 collection, published by Random House. He’s a past-President of the League of Canadian Poets, and has won a number of literary awards for poetry, including the Canadian Jewish Book Award. His seventh and most recent book of poems is Something Blue and Flying Upwards: New and Selected Poems (Your Scrivener Press, Canada, 2006). He recently published a collection of essays on the psalms, The Poetry of Prayer (Edgeways Books, U.K., 2004). He’s Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Laurentian University.