Dr. Emily Vanderploeg is a practising writer of fiction and poetry. She received a BA(Hons) in English Language and Literature and Art History from Queen’s University (ArtSci ‘06), completed teacher’s college at the Institute of Education at University College London, and received an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University. Her writing has been published in both Canada and the UK in literary magazines, shortlisted for the Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Award, longlisted for the 2018 Women Poets’ Prize, and received a Literature Wales New Writers Bursary Award in 2019 for her recently completed novel. Her poetry pamphlet, Loose Jewels, won the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition and was published in 2020, and her debut collection of poetry, Strange Animals, was published by Parthian Books in 2022. Dr. Vanderploeg was Academic Assistant to Professor Carolyn Smart on CWRI 295 for nine years and took over as Instructor in 2022. Originally from Aurora, Ontario, she lives in Swansea, Wales.
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Strange Animals
In these poems, Emily Vanderploeg brings us a menagerie - Hungarian dogs greet you on the Metro with a nod and bears enter wrestling matches; wild boar and turkeys flit past as we swim with whales, are swarmed by gypsy moths, and dream of cicadas. She tells us to sharpen our teeth on a porcupine, look inside a lamprey's mouth, and watch kittens catch refracted light, as we listen for clues in the song of whippoorwills and sandpipers. Charting a journey with these strange animals from Canada to Wales, childhood home to the vagaries of modern love, Vanderploeg explores issues of language, ritual, death and identity. Join her and these creatures as they tell fortunes and guide us to look at life in curious new ways.
Loose Jewels
Where does identity live? In nationality or tradition? Language or place? Or perhaps identity is a moving, living thing — the passage of time from the home in which we’re born to the home that we create. A grandchild of Hungarian and Dutch immigrants to Canada, and an immigrant herself to Wales and Hungary, in these poems Emily Vanderploeg seeks to make sense of pathways, both inherited and her own.
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- Fiction
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