Award-winning poet Jordan Abel will appear on the UWindsor campus in events Tuesday and Wednesday sponsored by the Aboriginal Education Centre and the Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing.

Professor Susan Holbrook calls Abel one of the most important contemporary writers in North America. His first book, The Place of Scraps, revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-20th-century ethnographer who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. It won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the BC Book Prize for poetry.

For his subsequent books Un/Inhabited and Injun, he intervenes in the texts of 91 “Western” pulp novels.

“Visually all Abel’s books are stunning, but in performance they are even more striking and moving, as he ‘plays’ them, and furthers the project through inventive work with a soundboard,” says Dr. Holbrook.

Abel will perform his work for the public at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 22, in room 202, Toldo Health Education Centre. He will also deliver the free public lecture “Distant Reading Indigenous Poetry in Canada” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 23, in room 354, Dillon Hall.