About

…and the author of four full-length poetry collections, including Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020) and No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), which was nominated for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award (Atlantic Book Awards). Her third collection Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), a book that explores miscarriage, disenfranchised grief, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the J.M. Abraham Award (Atlantic Book Awards). MacAskill’s fourth book of poetry, Votive, was published in the fall of 2024 by Gaspereau Press, and was recently shortlisted for the Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award.

MacAskill has served as Poet-in-Residence with Arc Poetry Magazine and taught creative writing through the League of Canadian Poets’ P.K. Page Mentorship Programme, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Programme, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, among others.

MacAskill has been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc‘s Poem of the Year Contest, The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Prize, Grain Magazine‘s Short Grain Contest, The New Quarterly‘s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and other literary awards and prizes. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry, This Magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries, Plenitude, Room Magazine, Grain Magazine, Riddle Fence, Prism, Versal, The Stinging Fly, The Fiddlehead, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Lemon Hound, The Antigonish Review, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her fiction has appeared in journals including Canthius, Plenitude, The Ampersand Review, and EVENT, and has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and shortlisted with the National Magazine Awards. She is a member of Room Magazine‘s Growing Room Collective and the publisher of Opaat Press.

MacAskill holds a PhD in French literature from Western University and has published articles in journals such as the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, L’Année ronsardienne, French Studies Bulletin, and Renaissance et Réforme / Renaissance and Reformation. She has taught courses in French language, literature, and translation as a contract faculty member at Western University, Conestoga College, Mount Saint Vincent University, and Saint Mary’s University.

A settler of French and Scottish ancestry, Annick MacAskill was born and raised in London, Ontario, on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton Nations. She now lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

(author photo by Coral Maloney)

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