Stephen Collis
Stephen Collis teaches contemporary North American poetry at SFU, with a focus on how literature intersects with movements for social change and justice. Author of five books of poetry and recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2011, Collis also writes social criticism. Last fall, he was a Shadbolt Fellow at SFU, allowing him one year off to write based on a proposal for a book-length philosophical essay on change.
“Virtually every discipline — whether in the humanities, physics, biology, you name it — has an explanation of change (how things change, why things change) at its core,” Collis explains. “I was interested in the relationship between art and social change — the idea of the avant-garde, of art that is oriented towards social change.”
In the midst of this, the Occupy movement occurred. Collis believed in the cause and volunteered to write for and about the movement; the essays he wrote were published online and later became part of his latest book, Dispatches from the Occupation.
The rest of the book was created from his original proposal, exploring the concept of change broadly during the current global economic and political crisis. Stephen cites the Arab Spring, Indignados, Occupy, Quebec students, and Idle No More as just a few examples.
“I’m convinced we are living through one of the great transitions in world history, and we all have to play whatever role we can in this,” states Collis on his writings for social change. “I have a small platform as a writer, and thus a responsibility to speak to the crisis we face. But I’m also another body in the street, and I realize it’s my responsibility to be there too.” In May 2013, Collis’ first novel, The Red Album, will be published with BookThug.
Matt Hern
Matt Hern is a sessional faculty member in the Urban Studies department at SFU, as well as a writer, organizer, and activist. He has founded a number of community projects including Car Free Vancouver Day, which started as a block party on Commercial Drive and has since spread to four major neighbourhoods around the city. Hern’s motivation is simple: he is interested in working in his community and with his neighbours on pressing social problems.
This sentiment is echoed in his book Common Ground in a Liquid City. “The core argument is that an ecological future has to be an urban future, but we can remake our cities as something other than crass investment mechanisms populated by greed and shoppers. We can reimagine cities as something better: compact, funky, self-generating places full of community, common places, and vibrancy.” Hern’s other projects are youthbased: Purple Thistle Centre and the newly launched Groundswell, just to name a couple.
The Purple Thistle is a youth-run community centre for arts and activism. Founded in 2001 as an answer to an alternative-to-school community institution for youth, it has since grown to a 2,500 square-foot resource centre run by youth, for youth, and completely free. Stay Solid!: A Radical Handbook for Youth will be published on Feb. 28. It was edited by Hern and written as a “scrapbook-style collection of ideas and stories, information, advice, and encouragement to stay solid and build a good life in a crazy world” by a collective of people from Purple Thistle.
Groundswell is Hern’s latest endeavour. Launching soon, Groundswell is a training institute designed to help young people under 35 start their own cooperatives, collectives, and social enterprises and other grassroots economic alternatives.
