Margo LaPierre is a Canadian freelance editor and the author of Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025). She serves on the Arc Poetry Magazine executive and editorial boards and is a member of poetry collective VII, who jointly authored Towers (Collusion Books, 2021) and Holy Disorder of Being (Gap Riot Press, 2022).
She won the 2021 Room Magazine Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Lush Triumphant Fiction Award. She was shortlisted in the 2021 Fiddlehead Creative Nonfiction Contest and the 2024 Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence, and has been a finalist in the TWUC Short Prose Competition, the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Award, the Short Grain Fiction Contest, the Austin Clarke Fiction Contest, and the Fiddlehead Fiction Contest.
Her multi-genre work has been published in the /temz/ Review, Room, Arc, filling Station, CAROUSEL, PRISM International, carte blanche and others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Find her on Instagram @margo_lapierre.
Editing poetry requires a whole different toolkit and often a subtler, more generative and expansive approach than when editing other genres.
While it may seem like there are fewer rules and conventions when it comes to poetry, or that poems’ inner workings are too mysterious to confidently edit, the fact remains that there are good poems and bad poems. Some poetry collections win awards while many other manuscripts never get published. How can we write our best poems and find our audience?
A poem is an emotion-mediating technology. It is an object with strange and important work to do, but it is an object nonetheless, one with a physical body, whose body can be more or less successful at communicating emotional information. We’ll look to the visual arts to apply aesthetic principles to honour and draw out our intentions for our poetic work. We’ll also look at ways to get published by determining our place within our contemporaries’ milieu, for a more robust engagement with the CanLit poetry community. In this workshop, we'll discuss how to edit poetry using the elements and principles of design.
A visit with students for a poetry editing workshop, career discussion, and/or author/editor Q&A.
