About

…and the author of three full-length 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 most recent collection is Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), a book that explores miscarriage, disenfranchised grief, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In 2022, this collection won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Poetry.

MacAskill recently served as Poet-in-Residence with Arc Poetry Magazine. She has been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc‘s Poem of the Year Contest, The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, Grain Magazine‘s Short Grain Contest, The New Quarterly‘s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and other literary honours. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, This Magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries, Plenitude, Room Magazine, Grain Magazine, Riddle Fence, Prism, Versal, The Stinging Fly, The Fiddlehead, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, Lemon Hound, and Contemporary Verse 2. She is a member of Room Magazine‘s Editorial Collective and Goose Lane’s icehouse Poetry Board.

MacAskill holds a PhD in French literature from Western University, where she completed a thesis on the sixteenth-century poet and translator Anne de Marquets. Her articles on Renaissance French and Neo-Latin poetry have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, French Studies Bulletin, Le Verger, and Renaissance et Réforme / Renaissance and Reformation. She teaches in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s University.

Originally from London, Ontario, she currently lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

[author photo by Nolan Natasha]

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