NIKKI REIMER
(pronouns she/they)
NIKKI REIMER creates poetry, essays, and multimedia artworks that interrogate capitalist structures and consider the variegated forms that grief can take.
MAJOR works
Reimer’s fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We (Talonbooks 2023) was a semi-finalist for both the Pat Lower Memorial Award and the Raymond Souster Award. Their first book, [sic] (Frontenac House, 2010), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Reimer has also published the poetry books My Heart is a Rose Manhattan (Talon Books, 2019) and DOWNVERSE (Talon Books, 2014).
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HYBRID professional creative practice
Since adolescence, Reimer has performed poetry, dance, and music across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Born and raised in 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 Diversity Initiatives for CBC Vancouver, and acted as temporary Managing Editor of EVENT literary magazine.
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.
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).
Multi-media, performance, and collaborative projects have included sound-art project YES SYDO (2020-2025) and graphic chapbook 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 versions
MAX 50 WORDS
NIKKI REIMER’s critical and creative work grapples with death, grief, illness, and late capitalism. Despite this, people seem to think they are pretty funny. Their fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We, was long listed for both the Raymond Souster and the Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.
MAX 150 WORDS
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. GRIEFWAVE.com, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, was launched in February 2022. She is currently exploring technocultural death discourse while working towards an MA in communication and media studies. A fifth-generation white prairie settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent, Reimer currently lives on the occupied lands of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta.
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. Reimer’s work has been extensively reviewed, often noting their embrace of dark humour and feminist refusal.
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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.
Photo by Heather Saitz.
“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
