Spoken Music Written Word Filmography Biography Home Upcoming email

Leanne Averbach is a Canadian text and performance poet.

As a former trade union organizer and left-wing activist, her experiences include some indelible moments spent in factories or incarcerated in jail cells. Family and love encounters often incite her work, as do visual art and the “mad poetry” of harsh international realities. 

Her first volume of poetry, fever, was released in Spring 2005 (Mansfield Press), and she has since released a companion CD, also entitled fever. Averbach has performed her poems with jazz musicians in Canada, the US, Italy and the UK.

Leanne's work has been published in several literary magazines including: The Fiddlehead, Descant, Antigonish Review, Washington Square, Dalhousie Review, Sub-Terrain, Poetry New Zealand, The New Quarterly, Canadian Women's Studies, Grain, and Big City Lit.

Leanne formerly taught at the University of British Columbia. She also has an MFA from The New School in New York City.



** BEST SHORT INTERNATIONAL FILM, POETIC GENRE
New York International Independent Film & Video Festival 2008

** BEST SHORT FILM
Palm Desert Film Festival, 2008

Short Listed for the 2006 Gerald Lampert Memorial First Book Award

DFAIT Canadian Embassy, New York City, March 2005
$1600 travel grant for launch of CD & book

Poets & Writer’s Grant, September 2004
nominated by New York Arts & Dance Innovation

Big City Lit Int’l Chapbook Contest, New York City, 2003
Honourable Mention (3rd place)

Poets & Writer’s Grant, New York City, 2002
nominated by Knitting Factory Reading Series

Sub-Terrain Magazine Last Poems Contest, 2000
Runner-up