The Occasion: In October 2021, something wonderful and astonishing happened: three authors published by small but mighty Windsor-based Palimpsest Press were nominated for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Awards: Sadiqa de Meijer for non-fiction, G.A. Grisenthwaite for fiction, and Tolu Oloruntoba for poetry. In November, Sadiqa de Meijer and Tolu Oloruntoba were indeed announced as two of this year’s seven English language Governor General’s Literary Award winners. Today we’re speaking with Palimpsest Press publisher and past guest Aimee Parent Dunn, along with GGLA winning poet, Tolu Oloruntoba.
About Tolu: Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Nigeria, and practiced medicine before his current work managing virtual health projects for BC health organizations. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, The Maynard, Humber Literary Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art. His debut chapbook, Manubrium, was published by Anstruther Press, and was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award, while his debut full-length poetry collection, The Junta of Happenstance, published by Palimpsest Press in Spring 2021, recently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in Surrey, BC with his family.
About Aimee: Aimee Parent Dunn is from Essex County and received her BA in English at the University of Windsor. In 2012, she became a publishing assistant at Palimpsest Press, which had been founded by Dawn Kresan in 2000. Just over a year later, with the support of her husband Shaun Dunn, she bought the press and became its publisher, with Dawn remaining as a poetry editor and designer. Palimpsest Press is a small independent publishing house that publishes beautifully designed books of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. A palimpsest, by the way, is a piece of writing material manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for other writing.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/