Mic Check Poet Profile: Jennifer Still
Letting the Light In: Jennifer Still’s Unfolding Story of Winnipeg
By: Chey Wright | IDIC Verse
February 26, 2026
Jennifer Still, Winnipeg’s 2025-2026 Poet Laureate, does not speak about poetry as if it belongs quietly on a shelf. For Jennifer, poetry is limestone in a back alley. It is a beer cap turned into the word love. It is a hole punched through paper so light can pass through. It is rivers. It is people. It is re-pair, re-vive, re-member. It is everywhere.
When I asked how she found her way into poetry, she didn’t begin with a classroom or a publishing milestone. She began at eight or nine years old, writing words in her back lane with limestone from her driveway. “Messages are everywhere,” she said. Not necessarily needing a reader—just needing to imagine one. To externalize something quiet inside her. That instinct has never left.
Now, as Poet Laureate, she is dreaming up “secret poems” planted permanently around the city—poems that might only appear when light hits them at a certain hour in the day. Not obvious plaques or framed stanzas, but subtle interactions. A word that glows only in winter. A line that reveals itself at dusk. Poetry that finds you.
If there is a central question in Jennifer’s work, it is belonging. Home. Origin. Lineage.
Her poems return again and again to family threads—girlhood, motherhood, matriarchs, and now increasingly, her children. Threads become roots. Roots become seeds. There is a craft in metaphor, but also literal craft. Jennifer’s page poems are carefully composed objects. She does not consider herself a slam poet in the traditional sense. Instead, she wants the page itself to perform. “The page is a score of a voice,” she told me. Ideally, you should be able to see how the poem sounds just by looking at it.
Interestingly, what once began for her as an image now begins with voice. A plain line arrives in her mind, and she follows its cadence forward. It is musical. A gravity. Recently, she challenged herself to re-see Winnipeg as if for the first time. One morning she woke up thinking about the Belgian Club—a building with sand in its basement, like a hidden beach in the middle of February.
That practice of looking again is at the heart of her current civic project: The Story of Winnipeg.
The Story of Winnipeg is an invitation to all Winnipeggers to share their lyrical and literal interpretation of our city. It asks residents not just to describe Winnipeg, but to write their own Winnipeg poem. The project removes the barrier of “expertise” and replaces it with play, curiosity, and participation.
At its center are fill in the blank tiny map books—ingenious objects created from a single piece of paper. The page is opened in the center, cut and folded into a new structure that transforms into a small, handheld book. One sheet becomes something dimensional. Something interactive. Something you can hold.
The structure mirrors the intention. Winnipeg, too, can be unfolded differently depending on how you hold it. Jennifer Still’s project is not about imposing poetry into the city. It is about revealing that poetry is already here.
Place matters deeply in her work. Born near the Assiniboine River and rooted in Treaty One territory, Jennifer spoke openly about her Métis lineage—once silenced in her family, now something she feels growing stronger within her. As Poet Laureate, she wrote her own land acknowledgement on the back of a piece of work, filling empty space with something personal and grounded. That sense of return, of rooting into rivers and lineage, informs how she approaches this city-wide listening project.
When her mother passed away, Jennifer’s relationship to language shifted. Grief closed certain doors but opened others. She began creating pinhole poems—erasure works punctured with tiny holes, meant to be held to the light. Words revealed through absence. Poetry, for her, has never been flat. It requires touch and attention.
She is equally passionate about dismantling the idea that poetry is elitist. “If you have something to say and a desire to share it,” she told me, “There’s your poem.” Grocery lists can be poems; Text messages can be poems. Conversations can be poems.
Life is poetry. The question is whether we are attentive enough to hear it.
Winnipeggers will have the chance to experience that attentiveness firsthand on March 3rd, when Jennifer will be the feature poet at the open mic at The Handsome Daughter on Sherbrook. The evening begins at 6:00 p.m., offering audiences an opportunity to see how her page based, tactile work transforms in a live setting—voice, rhythm, and presence meeting room and crowd.
When Jennifer’s term as Poet Laureate ends, she hopes the city will have had a moment where it hears itself together. The Story of Winnipeg is only a seed of that larger vision—a way for a city to pause, fold a piece of paper, and discover something unexpected inside.
Not poetry imposed.
Poetry revealed.
And maybe one day, when sunlight catches a wall just right and a hidden word appears, we’ll remember that the city has been speaking all along.
Jennifer Still composes poems with physicality in the Red River Valley, Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation. She is of Red River Métis and mixed European ancestry from a family of homesteaders, trade labourers and Railway workers. Physical labour is important to her practice as she reimagines what a page can be and how a poem can be experienced. She illuminates her pages with pinholes, typewriter cutouts, thread and carbon sheets. She is the author of 4 books of poetry and Winnipeg's 4th Poet Laureate.
