Sarah Tolmie

Sarah Tolmie is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and a longtime poet. She has been writing speculative fiction since 2006 and practicing and performing the dance form known as contact improvisation since 2009. Her first novel, The Stone Boatmen, is out now from Aqueduct Press. The product of a long-term scholarly fascination with the medieval poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, the novel follows four different protagonists, all visionaries, as they live through a moment of cultural renaissance: Nerel, the prince; Mahar, the navigator; Rose, a renegade priest turned poet; and Fjorel, her daughter, a seer whose powers bridge both space and time. The stories stick close to the bone of their lived experience, trying to capture the everyday enigma of living through a period of massive change, in which things are happening that nobody yet has words for.