Voice from the Wildherness

Jude launched her newest book, Water Forgets Its Own Name, on Bowen Island and in Vancouver in November, 2023. Purchase it now >

Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, mentor, educator, opera singer and spoken word performer. Jude has publishes frequently in a variety of print and online journals, including The Antigonish Review, Ascent Aspirations, Quill, and Leaf Press. She is included in anthologies, and e-zines, and has been short-listed, highly commended, and a finalist in other international competitions.

Jude believes that her writing should move, elevate, and illuminate. Her poems are like snapshots appearing on the page. They give a brief, intense look at love, sex, relationships, nature and desire. She prefers to keep her poems short to better capture the moments and images that are constantly filtering through her brain. Believing that in brevity lies power, Jude likes to start with a larger version of a poem and whittle it down to its essential self.

Collaborations written, painted and sung

Jude has a long history of collaborations, and her most recent book is an intertwining of her words with the paintings of Nicholas Jennings. As reviewer Pauline LeBel says “Jude Neale finds inspiration in the beauty of Nicholas Jennings’ paintings, evoking tender memories of her life on the island: the gathering of pebbles in a drawstring purse; skipping stones onto the mirrored sea with her five-year-old; the summer when her paddles held dragonflies.” Learn more on the book page for Water Forgets Its Own Name.

Jude published her last book in the fall of 2022. Here her publisher, Richard Olafson, holds up a copy of The Flaw. It is available to order from Ekstasis Editions. Jude participated in live launches on Bowen Island, Vancouver and Victoria in the fall that year. Learn more about The Flaw; see the press release.

In 2020 Jude was writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House, where she wrote her tenth book of poetry, Inside the Pearl. Her husband, photographer Paul Hoosen, created the evocative images for the book. It was published in 2021 by Guernica Editions.

Jude is publishing another fresh collection of poetry in 2021, entitled The River Answers (Ekstasis Editions). Her eighth book, Impromptu, (Ekstasis Editions) was published in 2020.

She has been a winner in competitions featuring flash fiction and short stories. Her book A Quiet Coming of Light, a Poetic Memoir (Leaf Press) was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, in recognition of Canadian female poets, and her poetry was a finalist for the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize in Ireland. Jude has collaborated with many artists including the visual artist Jane Kenyon at their textile/poetry installation in June and July, 2021, at the Hearth Gallery on Bowen Island, BC.

One of Jude’s poems from her book, Splendid in Its Silence, was chosen by Britain’s Poet Laureate to ride with other winners around the Channel Islands on public transit for a year, and she was a featured reader at the Guernsy International Literary Festival. This book was an SPM Prize winner and was published in the UK. Some of the poems in this collection can be heard on Jude’s collaborative EP, Places Beyond with the renowned composer and viola player, Thomas Beckman. Jude and Thomas subsequently performed the world premier of their original St. Roch Suite with the Prince George Symphony Orchestra.

Jude and Bonnie Nish started an online collaboration in 2018 which led them to write Cantata in Two Voices (Ekstasis Editions) in fifty challenging days. She had two books, A Blooming (Ekstasis Editions) and We Sing Ourselves Back, published in 2019.

“Fresh, mesmerizing, original and exuberant (but with a necessarily haunted and dark side), these are such emotionally stunning poems that I recommend them very highly to your attention. Jude has a great sense of rhythm too, but then she’s a classically trained mezzo-soprano. She also has an uncanny way of allowing her unconscious to toss up images whose random illogic’ enchants. “

Elisabeth Harvor “The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring”, “An Open Door In The Landscape”