The Poet Laureate Podcast

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (U of A Press, 2024), the poetry collections snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), the book of sentences (U of C Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). He runs above/ground press (b. 1993), the ottawa small press book fair (b. 1994), Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] (b. 2014) and periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (b. 2020), all of which he founded. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.