Dr. Stephanie McKenzie, BA (Victoria), MA (Concordia), PhD (Toronto)
Full professor—English
Phone: (709) 639-2399
Email: n7sm@mun.ca
Office: teaching remotely until January 2027.
Research Interest/Expertise
West Indian women’s poetry (with a special focus on Jamaican Canadian author Pamela Mordecai); Caribbean literature; Indigenous literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada; world poetry; grass roots literature and movements.
(Note: see the holdings with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, which houses numerous contributions by McKenzie): https://dloc.com/results?q=stephanie+mckenzie
Teaching
McKenzie has created the following courses while at Grenfell: Eden Robinson; Jamaican-Canadian Women Writers; The Poetry of Pamela Mordecai; Pride Literature in Canada (re-named Queer Literature in Canada). She has taught a wide variety of courses in various subject areas, including Canadian literature, West Indian literature, Indigenous literature, women’s literature, queer literature and introductory courses on prose, drama, and poetry.
Selected Publications from the Last Five Years Only (2020-2025)
(Note: if someone wishes to see earlier publications, please contact McKenzie for her c.v.)
Books (as co-editor)
Bailey, Carol, and Stephanie McKenzie, editors. A Fierce Green Place: new, selected and uncollected poems, by Pamela Mordecai. With “Walk a Short Way wid Dis Sistren: A Conversation with the Editors,” by Bailey, Carol, and Stephanie McKenzie, pp. 197-204, New Directions Publishing, 2022. https://www.ndbooks.com/book/a-fierce-green-place/
MacDonald, Teri-Ann, and Stephanie McKenzie, editors. Twine Loft: Stories and Sayings from the Oral Tradition, by Rex Brown. With Afterword by Stephanie McKenzie, pp.159-63, Flanker Press, 2021. https://flankerpress.com/product/twine-loft
Preface
“Acknowledging Canada’s Genocide.” Postcolonial Text, vol.165, no. 3, 2021, pp. 1-5.https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/2780/2518
Journal Issue (as co-editor)
Bailey, Carol, and Stephanie McKenzie, editors. Special Journal of West Indian Literature on Pamela Mordecai. April 2023. (journal is peer-reviewed, though my contribution as editor is not). https://www.jwilonline.org/downloads/vol-31-no-2-april-2023/
Peer Reviewed Book Chapter
"La poesía de la poeta jamaicana Tanya Shirley y la poeta jamaicana canadiense Pamela Mordecai. Una llamada a la acción." Trans. E. Sánchez-Pardo, in Poéticas Comparadas de Muleres. Las Poetas y la transformación del discurso poético en los siglos 19 y 20. Ed. Esther Sánchez-Pardo. Foro Hispánico vol. 64. pp. 304-325. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2022. (refereed)
https://brill.com/display/book/9789004504592/BP000019.xml
Interviews
McKenzie has focused over the years on interviewing writers and on building archives of writers performing their work.
Printed Interview
Desimone, Arturo. Interview by Stephanie McKenzie. “Arturo Desimone, Aruban Argentinian Writer and Visual Artist: An Interview.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 28, no. 2, 2020, pp. 141-56. (the interview was transcribed from the following video-recorded in-person interview with Desimone in Buenos Aries): https://dloc.com/AA00078547/00001/downloads
Oral Interviews
- Creative Voice: Oral Histories of the Arts Community in Newfoundland & Labrador. Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL), Memorial University, St. John’s, 2022 (interviews with Joe Byrne, Tom Dawe, Mary Dalton, Stan Dragland and Bernice Morgan). An interview conducted with Rex Brown in 2018 is also included in this collection. https://collections.mun.ca/digital/collection/oralhistories
Conference Presentation
“The Importance of Archives in Transnational Feminist Poetics,” American Comparative Literature Association, 16-19, 2023, Chicago.
Symposium
Roundtable speaker at Continued Conversations: Caribbean Women and Literature. Amherst College, Massachusetts. 21-22, 2023, Amherst.
Creative Writing
“Suite from Martinique.” World Literature Today. November, 2023. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2023/november/suite-martinique-stephanie-mckenzie
“Creative Distancing and the Creative Process.” World Literature Today. May 6, 2021. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/pandemic-dispatches/creative-distancing-and-creative-process-stephanie-mckenzie
Review
Rev. of Land of Many Shores: Perspectives from a Diverse Newfoundland and Labrador, St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2021. Edited by Ainsley Hawthorn. Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 2022. Vol. 31, no. 1.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/NFLDS/article/view/33496/1882529047
Other:
McKenzie is Interviews Editor for Postcolonial Text.
In addition to her academic and literary work, McKenzie was also Artistic Director of The March Hare (Atlantic Canada’s largest literary festival) from 2014 until its final year, in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Hare_(festival)
McKenzie was also the co-founder and co-producer of The April Rabbit, an annual event held in Corner Brook, NL from 1998-2013, which showcased and promoted emerging writers, artists and musicians. See here for details.
Notable publications/considerations (outside of five-year time range)
Reprint
Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology. 2007. University of Toronto Press, 2019. See https://utorontopress.com/ca/blog/2019/02/08/before-the-country-the-native-renaissance-and-our-search-for-a-national-mythology/
Performance of McKenzie’s poem “One More Way to See” by the Emily Carr String Quartet
Adaptation of McKenzie’s poem “One More Way to See” by modern composer Jennifer Butler for the Emily Carr String Quartet and mezzo-soprano Marian Newman. Victoria Symphony, New Music Festival. 2019. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV5f23olF9A
Two Bodies of Recordings: Pamela Mordecai and Vladimir Lucien
McKenzie embarked on a pilot project in 2015, of which she was executive producer, and brought Pamela Mordecai to the CITL studios at MUN, St. John’s to have all of her poetry publications until that point in time videorecorded (each poem has its own video file). McKenzie invited Vladimir Lucien to do so as well in 2017.