Nikki Reimer

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NIKKI REIMER (she/her/they/them) is a multimedia poet, artist and writer, and chronically ill neurodivergent prairie settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent currently living in Moh’kins’tsis, settler name Calgary, where she was born and raised. Reimer has also lived in and is emotionally tied to the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, settler name Vancouver, where they worked in community with the Kootenay School of Writing and W2 Community Media Arts, worked on contract in Communications and Diversity Initiatives for CBC Vancouver, and acted as temporary Managing Editor of EVENT Magazine over 2011-12. Reimer received a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Calgary in 2002.

Reimer's poetry often explores digital culture, feminism, late capitalism, and interrogates power relationships. They frequently write non-fiction essays on death, grief, and its aftermaths. Poetry, non-fiction writing, collaborative interdisciplinary performance and artworks have appeared in print, digital form and meatspace via stages, billboards, public art exhibits, poem-plays, magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Maisonneuve, The Capilano Review, Watch Your Head: Writers & Editors Respond to the Climate Crisis and Locations of Grief: an emotional geography.

Reimer has published several collections of poetry, including My Heart is a Rose Manhattan (Talonbooks 2019) and DOWNVERSE (Talonbooks 2014). No Town Called We is forthcoming from Talon Books in fall 2023. In 2010, they were shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for [sic] (Frontenac House).

Though their practice began in the literary arts, Reimer's artistic work has taken turns into multiple forms of interdisciplinary artmaking, including visual art and video, installation work, and performance practice. "Trigger Warning," a play commissioned by Swallow A Bicycle Theatre Company for their ten year anniversary retrospective, explores how gossip and the whisper network can both combat and reify rape culture within Canadian cultural circles. Reimer's work has been extensively reviewed, often noting their embrace of dark humour and feminist refusal. Reimer received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to produce GRIEFWAVE, a multi-media extended elegy, which launched in 2022. Visit griefwave.com to explore the project.

Reimer has attended two juried residencies at the Banff Centre. They are currently a member of the Writers' Union of Canada, and recently participated in TWUC's mentorship micro-grants program, mentoring filmmaker Marisa Hoicka.

Reimer currently works as Senior Digital Specialist for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary. She is a founding co-director of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society, an Alberta registered charitable society that contributes funding towards the Chris Reimer Legacy Award at the Mount Royal University Conservatory and contributes to dance bursaries for boys from marginalized backgrounds at Decidedly Jazz Danceworks. The Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society has released two posthumous projects of Chris Reimer's music: The Chad Tape, and the full-length vinyl album Hello People.

In Fall 2023 Reimer will be entering a part-time communication studies master's program at the University of Calgary, where they plan to investigate relationships between death and digital culture in contemporary North American society.

Reimer lives with multiple dynamic disabilities, including chronic pain and migraine disease.

patreon.com/nikkireimer

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MEDIUM LENGTH PUBLICITY CITY BIO

NIKKI REIMER creates poetry, essays, and multimedia artworks that interrogate capitalist structures and consider the variegated forms that grief can take.

Carrying forth the feminist complaints and refusals of My Heart is a Rose Manhattan (2019), No Town Called We continues to punch through the veils of complacency and greed that shape the cultures of the petrostate. Other major works include griefwave.com (2022), DOWNVERSE (Talonbooks 204) and [sic] (Frontenac House 2010).

Creative work, non-fiction essays and critical writing have appeared in Arc, Order of the Good Death, Maisonneuve, The Rusty Toque, Capilano Review, and other print and web spaces.

Reimer is a non-binary, chronically ill, neurodivergent prairie settler residing on the traditional territories of the people of Treaty 7 in southern Alberta. Learn more at reimerwrites.com.

“Reimer’s poetics of failure becomes an important dimension of her critique of neoliberal environments.”

— Heather Milne, Studies in Canadian Literature

Photo by Heather Saitz. Please contact me for hi-res.

SHORT REPORT

Nikki Reimer (pronouns she/they), poet and interdisciplinary artist, works at the intersections of the analog and the digital, challenging conventional responses to bodies, death and capital. Their fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We, was published by Talon Books in fall 2023. She is currently exploring digital mediation of death and networked grief while working towards an MA in communication and media studies. A fifth-generation white prairie settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent, Reimer lives on the occupied lands of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta.

Although not herself an avid cyclist, Reimer has worked with both Swallow a Bicycle and About a Bicycle, and currently looks forward to ways of incorporating more bipedal transportation modes into her artistic practice in future.

Nikki Reimer wears a vintage flowered blouse and leans against a wall — Photo by Heather Saitz. Please contact me for hi-res.

SHORTEST OF ALL

ryan fitzpatrick recently referred to me as one of the “poetry oldheads.”