The Polyglot

05/09/2025

We're so thrilled to be part of 's third annual Harvest Book Fair!

✨September 27 & 28, 2025
✨1-5pm both days
✨ CKUA’s Alberta Hotel Building (Edmonton, AB)

Come and check out your favorite local bookshops, art + community organizations, presses and publishing houses all in one place!

We can't wait to see our pals at , , .yeg, , , , .press, , and more!

We'll have our issues and multilingual poetry chapbooks on sale!

21/08/2025

Meet our instructor for Writing is a Walk in the Park!

Join us this Saturday! The weather will be beautiful, the ducks will be out on the pond, and we'll have the best time writing and exploring.

📅 Sat. August 23
🕜 11:00am – 1:00pm
📍 Paul Kane Park (Edmonton)
🎟️ $25-$50 sliding scale, must register on our website
💛 All proceeds support the next issue of The Polyglot (Issue 15)
✨ All genres, languages, ages, and levels of experience welcome
📝 Bring a notebook, pen, and blanket to sit on

Photo of Adriana by Shawna Lemay

20/08/2025

A huge shout-out to Matthew Stepanic, who has been with The Polyglot since day one—offering invaluable advice, lending a hand at events when we’re selling issues and chapbooks, and sharing his expert eye as a copy editor for our publications.

Matthew is the former editor of the award-winning Glass Buffalo Magazine (2012–2020). Today, he edits and designs chapbooks for Agatha Press, which publishes poetry, essays, short stories, plays, and the occasional surprise—always in beautiful small-run editions on a risograph printer.

He also hosts VERS/E, a q***r poetry open mic at Felice Café, held on the first Wednesday of every month from September through April.

Follow these wonderful local initiatives:

We love you, Matthew! 💙

19/08/2025

THANK YOU to all of our past and current sponsors and partners!

👏 Edmonton Arts Council
👏 Canadian Heritage
👏 Supporting Indigenous Language Revitalization (SILR) at the University of Alberta
👏 Philippine Edmonton Events and Arts Society (PHIDEAS)
👏 Literary Translators' Association of Canada (LTAC)
👏 City of Edmonton
👏 Alberta Magazines Publishers Association
👏 Writers' Guild of Alberta
👏 Horizons Writers Circle
👏 Edmonton Poetry Festival
👏 LitFest
👏 Daaira House and The Green Room
👏 Otium (Italy)
👏 Laberinto Press

Thank you for your project-based support and funding!

Whether you’ve partnered with us on publishing an issue or chapbook, or on hosting a launch, workshop, or lab, we’re endlessly grateful.



.heritage .ltac

18/08/2025

WHY EDMONTON?

It is important to document why The Polyglot was born in Edmonton, Canada, on Treaty 6 Territory.

At the time of launching The Polyglot in 2016, Edmonton was leading the pack in terms of "linguistic diversity" growth.

Data showed the number of people in Edmonton who use a language OTHER than English or French as their mother tongue surged 31 per cent between the 2011 and 2016 censuses — a faster rate than in any of Canada’s other big cities.

More than 345,000 Edmontonians claimed a "non-official" first language, nearly double the number of the 1996 census and making up around a quarter of the metro area’s 1.3 million people.

However, of those, 87,115 regularly spoke an immigrant language at home, according to Statistics Canada, and ALL Indigenous languages reported were endangered.

Thus, we felt that we had a role to play in maintaining heritage and Indigenous languages by providing the first platform where multilingual artists and writers could freely live, write, gather, and hold events in other languages.

As this photo beautifully showcases, friendship is what has held us together, for the past nine years!

Photo from Multilingual Horizons event at the in 2018, launching the issue CanLit: Curating our Canons, edited by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi.

Authors pictured: Medgine Mathurin, Anna Mioduchowska, Ahmed Knowmadic Ali, Gail Sidonie Sobat, Adriana Onita, Anna Marie Sewell, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Nisha Patel, and Gian Marco Visconti.

Follow them!

.heritage

18/08/2025

Yahooo!!! Save the date!

🎉✨ Edmonton Filipino Fiesta 2025 ✨🎉

Tara na't maki-fiesta! 🇵🇭❤️ Celebrate the vibrant spirit of the Filipino community with us — FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Come enjoy delicious food, live music & dances, a colorful parade, tiendacitas, marketplace, heritage & culture zones, community hub, visual arts display, family fun activities, and so much more!

See you at the Lodge Inn Conference Centre on September 13 from 11AM to 9PM & September 14 from 11AM to 5PM.

17/08/2025

We’re so emotional these days, looking back through our nine-year history in Edmonton. 🥹❤️

This is the launch of our multilingual issue, Crosswalks, at the Marshall McLuhan House in Edmonton on April 17, 2017.

Were you there?! What do you remember?

Photos by Randall Edwards

1. Marshall McLuhan House
2. Adriana Oniță, .onita
3. Luciana Erregue-Sacchi
4. Pierrette Requier
5. Axel Perez .cyclist
6. Anton Iorga
7. Naomi McIlwraith
8. Yukari Meldrum
9. Our first issues were stapled and printed at SubPrint!
10. Lovely crowd at McLuhan House
11. Panel after the multilingual readings
12. and
13. .onita and Mariel Day

14/08/2025

BIG NEWS!

The Polyglot is a finalist for several Alberta Magazine Publisher Association Awards this year. Congratulations to all of our authors, poets, illustrators, editors, and designers!

✨Art Direction (Brett Boyd)
✨Innovation Award (The team!)
✨Cover (Crystal Lee Clark & Brett Boyd)
✨Poetry (Candice Joy Oliva)
✨Essay (Allie Tibbetts)
✨Illustration (Cedric Usman)

We couldn’t have done it without our amazing partners last year:
✨ Philippine Edmonton Events and Arts Society (PHIDEAS) and the City of Edmonton
✨ Supporting Indigenous Language Revitalization (SILR)

And our fantastic team members and guest editors:

✨ Maria Teodora Barbu (Innovation & Development)
✨ Mila Bongco-Philipzig (Guest Editor)
✨ Brett Boyd (Layout & Design)
✨ Lauren Carter (Managing Editor)
✨ Géo Estoesta (Social Media)
✨ Catalina Morales Vélez (Marketing & Comms)
✨ Adriana Onita (Founder)
✨ Corinne Riedel (SILR Partner)
✨ Anna Marie Sewell (Guest Editor)
✨ Lana Whiskeyjack (Guest Editor)
✨ Pamela McCoy Jones (SILR Partner)

& the rest of our lovely volunteers including Ting Elger Pimentel, Varinder Basanti, Tāriq Malik, and Adriana Boffa!

07/08/2025

Writing is a walk in the park // Workshop with Adriana Oniță

✨ REGISTER: https://www.thepolyglotmagazine.com/workshops-and-events/writing-walk-in-the-park

What do you wish you had more of in your creative life?

Community? Inspiration? Joy? A gentle nudge to begin?

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting to explore your voice, this workshop is for you. Join us for a joyful experience designed to spark creativity in anyone, especially those curious about poetry, language, or trying something new.

📅 Sat. August 23
🕜 11:00am – 1:00pm
📍 Paul Kane Park (Edmonton)
🎟️ $25-$50 sliding scale, must register on our website
💛 All proceeds support the next issue of The Polyglot (Issue 15)
✨ All genres, languages, ages, and levels of experience welcome
📝 Bring a notebook, pen, and blanket to sit on

A Note From Adriana:

I’ve invented some experiments for you that encourage play and surprise, sopratutto. I want us to remember that writing is “memorable, muscular, living, felt,” and, if we’re lucky, it will leave us “differently alive and forever changed,” in the words of Carl Phillips. There will be time to wander, write, draw, collect, share, and likely explode in laughter and awe at killer one-liners!

About Adriana:

Adriana Oniță is a poet, educator, translator, researcher, and founder of The Polyglot. She holds a PhD in language education and arts-based research. She writes poems and essays in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian, often combining them in playful ways. Her debut multilingual poetry book is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books. Photo credit: Shawna Lemay

Could you help us spread the word? , , , , ,

03/08/2025

Three beautiful poets you should know, all published in The Polyglot and all Edmonton poet laureates!

✨Pierrette Requier, who writes “from the liminal lingual space where English and French speak to one another” and who has championed The Polyglot from Day 1!

✨Ahmed “Knowmadic” Ali, who blends English, Somali and Italian into his spoken word performances and reminds us, in his poem “Carabka (The Tongue)” published in Issue 3: CanLit: Curating Our Canons, that it’s not about xoog (strength) but the aqli (mind) and how you use your waqti (time).

✨Medgine Mathurin, who stitches French, Haitian Creole and English in her poetry seamlessly, as witnessed in her debut chapbook that we published called Waiting in the Land of the Living / Attendre dans le monde des vivants. We can’t wait what she does during her term as Edmonton Poet laureate from 2025-2027!

02/07/2025

The City of Edmonton has a new Poet Laureate and it’s our very own multilingual author, MEDGINE MATHURIN!

✨What is a poet laureate?

The role of a Poet Laureate is to reflect the life of a city through readings of poetry. As an ambassador for the literary arts, the Laureate incorporates poetry into a range of official and informal city activities.

✨Who is Medgine Mathurin?

Medgine Mathurin is a Haitian-born spoken word artist and patient advocate who moved to Alberta when she was eleven years old.

Her multilingual upbringing (French, Haitian Creole, English) not only prompted her to begin experimenting with the potential and magic of language, but also naturally compelled her into a deep love of poetry.

Her poems reflect her journey towards self-love, her life as an immigrant, and her lived experience navigating the world with an ‘invisible’ chronic illness.

✨ Where can I find her poetry?

We were honoured to publish Medgine’s multilingual debut chapbook, Waiting in the Land of the Living / Attendre dans le monde des vivants, in July 2023, in front of a sold-out audience at Co*Lab, in partnership with the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

You may purchase a digital copy of the chapbook on our website, or order a physical copy from our printer. We are currently restocking copies at bookstores in Edmonton, but print copies can be ordered to anywhere in the world.

As said of the collection: “Medgine Mathurin is a poet who is unafraid to lay her heart bare on the page. Waiting in the Land of the Living pulses with vulnerability, grace and power. Each poem lifts off the page and travels across language, culture, and geography to tell a story of survival, unrelenting faith, and a body held tenderly in the healing light of love.”

✨ Where can I connect with Medgine?

To discover more of Medgine’s work, visit www.medgine.ca and connect with her on Instagram .