occasional writer | artist | student | citizen
nikki
reimer
Photo by Heather Saitz.
NIKKI REIMER
(pronouns she/they)
creates poetry, essays, critical work and multimedia artworks that interrogate capitalist structures and consider the variegated forms that grief can take. Despite this, people seem to think they are pretty funny.
major works
Reimer’s fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We, published by Talon Books in fall 2023, was longlisted for both the Raymond Souster and the Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.
GRIEFWAVE.com, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, was launched in February 2022, and has been performed to university creative writing classes and to the Carnegie Community Centre’s Community Death Care Project series. GRIEFWAVE was partially supported via a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Reimer has also published the poetry books My Heart is a Rose Manhattan (Talon Books, 2019), DOWNVERSE (Talon Books, 2014) and [sic] (Frontenac House, 2010), which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
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SELECTED Publications
Creative work, non-fiction essays and critical writing have appeared in journals like Arc, Order of the Good Death, Maisonneuve, The Rusty Toque, Capilano Review, and anthologies like Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak and Wynn, 2020); Watch Your Head: Writers & Editors Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020); Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Anvil Press, 2019); GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018); Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers (Rocky Mountain Books, 2018); Modern Loss: Candid conversations about grief. Beginners welcome (Harper Collins, 2018) and The Animated Reader (The New Museum, 2015).
Chapbooks have included Dinosaurs of Glory (above/ground press, 2023); Softbody (Model Press, 2021) and that stays news (Nomados Press, 2011).
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SELECTED Multi-media and collaborative PROJECTS
Multi-media, performance, and collaborative projects (as primary creator or participant) since 2000 have included YES SYDO (in progress, 2024) and Behind the Drywall (Gytha Press, 2021).
"Trigger Warning," a poem-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 cultural circles.
“shrine to extended possibilities” was commissioned by Sharon Stevens for the 2018 Equinox Vigil, an annual, communal, memorial event held in Calgary’s historic Union Cemetery between 2012 and 2018.
Reimer was an invited artist participant in the 2017 City of Calgary Water-witching for Wanderers (and Wonderers) public art project, led by Sarah Nordean and Alana Bartol, for which she created “tender tender tender.”
Two slides adapted from “Let’s Improvise a Bone Graft” (which became GRIEFWAVE) were commissioned by Wordfest’s “Word Powered Art” project in 2013.
“East Van Cats” was a photo project documenting the cats Reimer encountered while flaneuring through East Vancouver circa 2004-2012.
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bio note
Reimer holds a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Calgary.
A fifth-generation white prairie settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent, she currently lives on the occupied lands of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta in so-called Calgary.
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 english television diversity initiatives for CBC Vancouver, and acted as temporary managing editor of EVENT Magazine.
Their output of work over the course of their creative career has been infrequent and sporadic, as Reimer lives with multiple dynamic disabilities, including chronic pain and migraine disease.
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Critical research
Reimer is currently exploring digital mediation of death and networked grief while working towards a critical MA in communication and media studies at the University of Calgary.
In May 2024, they participated in Digital Power and Justice, the University of Calgary Department of Communication, Media and Film 2024 Graduate Conference. Reimer presented a panel paper titled “Death and digital justice: A consideration of the grievable,” drawn from an ongoing literature review on the sub-field of digital death by way of Butler.
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In a professional 9-5 capacity
Reimer is a senior digital communications specialist and content creator with over 15 years of experience in the higher education, arts and culture and public broadcasting sectors. Reimer is the digital lead for University of Calgary's Faculty of Arts, providing guidance on digital communications strategy, tools and design. Reimer is a strong writer and strategic thinker who brings inclusive user focus and empathy to everything they do.
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Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society
Reimer is one of the founding co-directors of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society, an Alberta registered charitable society that funds 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, both sold out with digital versions still available.
“we like this or that new work
we like that new cat
we don’t like the books that we tell each other to like
is it good? should i read it?
what are you working on?
should i read it?”
No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, social panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife.
From Dinosaurs of Glory.
From Dinosaurs of Glory
research Interests
Digital cultures
Death / grief positive discourse on social media
Political economy of death / grief content creation
Community, collectivity, ritual and affect
Platform techno-affective affordances
Photo by Heather Saitz.
Education
university of calgary, calgary, AB
MA COMMUNICATION STUDIES
IN PROGRESS
university of calgary, calgary, AB
B.A. ENGLISH HONOURS, CREATIVE WRITING CONCENTRATION
Graduated June 2002