January Marie Rogers Explained

January Marie Rogers
Birth Name:Janet Marie Rogers
Birth Place:Vancouver, British Columbia
Occupation:poet, artist, author, publisher
Language:English
Nationality:Six Nations of the Grand River, Canada
Genre:poetry, spoken word
Awards:American Indian Film Festival best music video award (2020)

January Marie Rogers (born 1963) is a First Nations Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations in Ontario. Her work includes poetry and spoken-word performance poetry.

Early life

Janet Marie Rogers[1] was born in Vancouver. She moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island in 1994.

Career

First working as a visual artist, she began writing in 1996. Rogers moved to the Six Nations reserve in June 2019, where she founded Ojistoh Publishing[2] and launched a Six Nations Inaugural Literary Award (SNILA).

Rogers has hosted the radio programs Native Waves Radio on CFUV and Tribal Clefs on CBC Radio One Victoria. She produced the radio documentaries Bring Your Drum: 50 Years of Indigenous Protest Music Resonating Reconciliation, which received awards for Best Radio at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. She produced a 6-part radio documentary titled NDNs on the Airwaves 2016 and a short doc of the same title with her media team 2Ro Media.

From January 2012 to November 2014, Rogers was City of Victoria's Poet Laureate. In 2015, she was named writer in residence for the University of Northern British Columbia. In September 2018, Rogers began a year-long writer in residence position at the University of Alberta.

Rogers formed the collective Ikkwenyes (Dare to Do) with Mohawk poet Alex Jacobs. The collective has received a Collaborative Exchange Award from the Canada Council for the Arts and a Loft Literary Fellowship prize from The Loft Literary Center.

From September 2022 to April 2023, Rogers was Western University in London ON's 50th Writer-In-Residence, a position shared with London Public Library, where she mentored both students and writers in the general community alike.

Published works

Poetry

Recordings

Awards

In 2020, the American Indian Film Festival gave Rogers' “Ego of a Nation" the best music video award.[2] Rogers has been nominated in the category Best Spoken Word Recording at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, the Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards and the Native American Music Awards.She has also been featured at the Vancouver Youth Poetry Slam, where she performed her spoken word poem "Opposite Directions" in 2013.[4]

Notes and References

  1. News: Rogers . Janet Marie . Two Poems . 3 November 2024 . The Ex-Puritan . 30 . Summer 2015.
  2. News: Jennings . Jo . Award-winning poet joins Western as new writer-in-residence . 3 November 2024 . Western news . Western University . 26 July 2022.
  3. Rogers . January . Hedlund . Dani . Behind the Masks: A Community Feature with Yellow Medicine Review ("The State of Indigeneity 2022") . F(r)iction: A Literary Anthology . Brink Literacy Project . February 2024 . 21 . 69.
  4. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Janet Marie Rogers - Opposite Directions . YouTube.