Adele Graf

Adele Graf grew up outside New York City and immigrated to Canada in 1968. She has worked as a writer and editor, and taught writing in the public and private sectors in Ottawa and Halifax. She lives in Ottawa with her spouse.

 

Her first poetry book, math for couples, was published by Guernica Editions in 2017. Her chapbook, a Baltic Friday early in grey, was published later that year by above/ground press.

 

This is what our 2018 judge Shane Rhodes said about Adele's manuscript:

 

What refreshes about this short manuscript is its willingness to see a story and an idea through. Suffused with nostalgia and memory, Directions to Suffern NY circa 1950 is a collection of poems that becomes more by being collected, as individual poems bounce off each other to become something bigger than their separate parts. In the background, you can read the hands of a tinkerer building the unifying metaphor -- of finding and giving directions taking us back to a personal history, a story and Suffern, New York – that carries these poems through. The individual poems show a sharp attention turning their commands into craft.