Literary: Award Winner Haley is a Renaissance New Media Artist

Stimulating and directing cultural fulmination is as natural to Heather Haley as manipulating media. She is an innovative programmer with a history of staunch commitment to the arts community and cultural awareness. 

With a strongly held conviction that artists, especially poets, needed to be represented on the World Wide Web, she founded The Edgewise Café in 1994, one of Canada's first electronic literary magazines, along with the non-profit arts organization, the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre. 

The EEC facilitated the Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Telepoetics, a videoconferenced reading series founded by Merilene Murphy. The Edgewise ElectroLit Centre's populist mandate and innovative programs effectively made poetry accessible to all and assisted Canadian artists in expanding both their audience and potential. 

Since 2004, Haley has been the host and curator of the Visible Verse Festival, North America's sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant poetry film and video. www.heatherhaley.com 

Haley and several other local literary figures of note will be honored at a ceremony on August 24, 2012, at CBC Studio 700. She then takes the stage the following day at Trout Lake with almost 90 other writers and performers for the Summer Dreams Literary Arts Festival. 

 As one might expect, putting on a big event with 3 stages, a children's area, a market place and 90+ performers is a lot of work, so the more help the festival can have the better. Volunteers are needed. It’s a great way to meet people and learn more about event planning and Vancouver's vibrant writing community. Those interested can sign up on The website at www.summerdreamsfest.com. For more information about the festival, including complete directions and line up, check out our website: www.summerdreamsfest.com or email srduncan@shaw.ca or call 604-788-8340