(Art) Song Lab

Where Poets Composers & Poets Come Together

Michel Beaudry

A freelance writer for the last thirty-five years, Michel Beaudry has roamed the world in search of great and unique stories to tell. He has eaten whale with Greenland Inuit, hiked above the clouds with Inca descendants, retraced the Silk Route with Kyrgyz horsemen and followed Morocco’s hashish trail with Berber friends. And his thirst for adventure is far from quenched. Inspired by the classical edict mens sana in corpore sano, the sexagenarian continues to push the performance envelope, whether he’s setting first ski tracks on a remote peak in northern Alaska or performing a live storytelling gig for a gaggle of graduate art students. His award-winning tales have appeared in GQ, Reader’s Digest, Outside, Sports Illustrated, The Globe & Mail, Canadian Business, the much lamented Equinox Magazine, Britain’s Daily Mail, France’s Le Monde and dozens of other publications. The widowed father of two amazingly talented daughters, Beaudry is currently enrolled at SFU’s The Writer’s Workshop, where he is hard at work on his first novel.

James Coomber

James Coomber is a composer, sound designer and musician based in Vancouver.  His artistic interests lie heavily in collaborative work, where the intermingling of disciplines pushes the boundary of audio-visual forms.  He is a graduate of music composition and theatre collaboration from the School of Contemporary Arts at SFU.  Recent highlights include composing for and performing in Noam Gagnon’s This Crazy Show (coming to to the Dance Centre this Fall), doing copyist work for Veda Hille and Amiel Gladstone’s Onegin, creating the music and sound for rice and beans theatre’s Mis Papás, and presenting work at the Prague Quadrennial, one of the world's largest scenography festivals.  Next up you can hear his music at Dancing on the Edge in Joshua Beamish/Move: the company’s fighting chance.

Co-Founder, Ray Hsu

Ray Hsu is author of two award-winning books of poetry: Anthropy (winner of the Gerald Lampert Award) and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon(winner of an Alcuin Award). He has published over 150 poems in over 50 publications in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Singapore and London. He has judged for the National Magazine Awards and the CBC Literary Award. He has taught creative writing at the SFU's The Writers Studio, the Banff Centre, UBC's creative writing program, as well as in a United States prison, where he taught for two years and founded the award-winning Prison Writing Workshop. He is also the Artistic Director of Visible Verse video poetry festival.

Read More

Donato Mancini

The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. He is the author of four books of poetry: Ligatures (New Star 2005) Æthel (New Star 2007), Buffet World (2011) and Fact 'n' Value (2011). He is also the author of the critical work You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012) . His current book, Loitersack (2014), is a book-length poetics essay in the form of poetry, poetics, theory, theory theatre, questions and laugh particles. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of British Columbia.

Jordan Alexander Key

Jordan Key, a resident of Arizona, has been studying composition since 2005. He has received performances from around the country, most recently featuring “Salve Regina,” performed by the College of Wooster’s Symphonic Choir in 2013 and "Vision of Cataclysm," by the Charlotte New Music Festival in 2014. His recent academic work has culminated in his thesis “Spirosony,” a study of spirituality through music, focusing primarily on experiences of music in chant+ In conducting his research, he spent residencies throughout a year at monasteries around the world, including the Abbey of Solesmes in France and the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Adam Scime

Adam Scime has been praised as "…a fantastic success…" (CBC) and "Astounding, the musical result was remarkable" (icareifyoulisten.com). Awards received for his work include The Socan Young Composer's Competition, The Karen Keiser Prize in Canadian Music, Esprit’s Young Composer Competition, and the Electro-Acoustic Composer’s Competition. Recent notable
performances include Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, New Music Concerts, The Esprit Orchestra, l'orchestre francophonie, The Continuum Ensemble, a feature in the Emergents Series at the
Music Gallery, the Hamilton Philharmonic New Music Festival, the UofT New Music Festival, and broadcasts on CBC Radio. Future projects include a new Opera for FAWN and the Thin Edge
Collective, commissions for The Esprit Orchestra, the Array Ensemble and New Music Concerts for upcoming seasons. Adam is currently studying as DMA student with Gary Kulesha at UofT
and previously with Paul Frehner at UWO.

Lucas Oickle

Lucas Oickle is an award-winning Nova Scotian composer currently based in Vancouver. In late 2014 he was awarded the prestigious "2011 Canada Games Young Artist of Excellence Award" by the Nova Scotia Talent Trust, which carries a $10 000 monetary prize.

Other accolades include winning the spring 2013 TEMPO Call for Scores, the Penthelia Singers' inaugural 'Canadian Folk Song Arranging Competition', the Via Choralis 2014 Composition Competition, and the 'Green Dot Composer Competition'. Previously, Lucas was a composer-in-residence for the Bathurst Chamber Music Festival and was the inaugural "Featured Student Composer" of the NSYO's 12/13 season.

Desirée Jung

Desirée Jung is a Canadian-Brazilian writer and translator. Her background is in creative writing, literary translation, film and comparative literature. She has received her MFA in Creative Writing and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations, poetry and short stories in Exile, The Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Antigonish Review, The Haro, The Literary Yard, Black Bottom Review, Gravel Magazine, Tree House, Bricolage, Hamilton Stone Review, Ijagun Poetry Journal, Scapegoat Review, Storyacious, The Steel Chisel, Loading Zone, Belleville Park Pages, among others.

Mirae Hwang

Composer and pianist Mirae Hwang is currently pursuing a doctoral degree from College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. She holds a master’s degree from College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati and bachelor’s degree in composition and information/multimedia culture from Seoul National University. As the winner in the 4th Eumyeon Composition Competition, she advanced to the final of the 3rd International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition and her works have been selected for many festivals including Upbeat International Music School in Croatia, Midwest Composer’s Symposium, Lexington Philharmonic’s New Music Experience, Fresh Inc Festival, New Music on the Point Festival, soundSCAPE Festival. She has studied with Michael Fiday, Joel Hoffman, Douglas Knehans and Shinuh Lee.

Nikki Hillman

Nikki Hillman is a writer of non-fiction, fiction and flash fiction. As a graduate of the Southbank Writing Program (2012) and The Writer's Studio (2013), she enjoys many roles within the writing community. Her co-hosting duties with the Southbank Reading Series is where she most enjoys supporting and encouraging other writers. She is also a facilitator of the Leigh Square Writers Group, runs several Creative Writing class for 9-12 year olds, and has embarked on a new project entitled FoundWords.

Nicholas Kelly

Nicholas Ryan Kelly is a classically-trained composer of speculative fiction. He recently finished dual master's degrees in music composition and library/information studies at UBC and has since been roaming the Prairies, working as a librarian in Edmonton and Saskatoon and composing whatever strikes his fancy. In 2014, his compositional activities ranged from readings by the Vancouver and Victoria Symphony orchestras to commissions and compositions for elementary school band and community choir.

Rhea Rose

Hi,
I'm a writer of short fiction and poetry, although, lately I've written two novels. I'm a graduate of UBC's creative writing MFA program. I've published many of my short stories in anthologies put out by Edge Press. I've also published much of poetry in the same series of anthologies (Tesseracts). My work is mostly speculative (SF and F).

Colin McMahon

Colin McMahon is a young composer from London, Ontario completing his undergrad at the University of Western Ontario. He has studied under David Myska, Omar Daniel, and Peter Paul Koprowski. Colin, still in his formative years of a composer, is working on developing his style, with an emphasis on vocal music. He has had premiers with the Western Chamber Ensemble and Bass Ryan Vamos. Colin is also the Editor-in-Chief for Nota Bene, Undergraduate Journal of Musicology, which encourages and promotes the academic research of undergrads.

Eve MacGregor

Eve is a poet who lives in Vancouver where she is a member of the Plays vs. Pipelines Collective. She attended Banff's Writing with Style where she was mentored by Ray Hsu and recently completed the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive with Betsy Warland. Eve is a lapsed software engineer.

(Art) Song Lab was created and takes place on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.