Carolyn Marie Souaid

Born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, she studied at McGill University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature (1981) and a diploma in Education (1983), and at Concordia University, where she earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing (1995). Her first poetry collection, Swimming into the Light, won the David McKeen Award for Poetry in 1996. Her books have been nominated for a number of literary awards in Canada including the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Award.

Souaid's work focuses on pivotal moments in Québécois history[2] and on the difficult bridging of worlds (English/French; native/non-native).[3] In 2010, she and longtime poetic collaborator Endre Farkas produced Blood is Blood, a controversial video-poem dealing with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.[4]

Well known for her activism on the Montreal literary scene,[5][6][7] Souaid co-produced Poetry in Motion in 2004 (which brought poems to Montreal buses[8]) and Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret showcasing the "theatre" of poetry.[9] In 2009, she co-founded Poetry Quebec, an online review dedicated to the English language poetry and poets of Quebec.[10] From 2008 to 2011, she served as poetry editor for Signature Editions, one of Canada's top publishers of poetry.[11]

Souaid has lived most of her life in Montreal, except for three years spent teaching in Inuit villages along Quebec's Hudson-Ungava coast in the early 1980s.[12]

Carolyn Marie Souaid's fourth collection of poetry, Satie's Sad Piano… is a fine achievement in attempting to explain the importance of Pierre Elliott Trudeau - and his passing, five years ago - for the national imagination. … This long poem is perhaps the first serious effort to encompass the nation since Dennie Lee's problematically Ontario centric/Torontonian Civil Elegies appeared in 1868 and 1972[13]

— George Elliott Clarke, The Chronicle Herald