Meet Kayla
In Atlantic Canada, we take a kitchen table approach to things. This relaxed, friendly world-view is part of what I do. My clients often call me just to chat. Authenticity & trust are just as important as providing a top-quality product.
KAYLA GEITZLER
is from Moncton, New Brunswick, within Siknikt of the Mi’kma’ki, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq People. Taught to read at age two, by five years old Kayla knew what she wanted to do with her life: write. Named “A Rad Woman of Canadian Poetry”, Kayla is Moncton’s inaugural Anglophone Poet Laureate & host of the Attic Owl Reading Series. Her first book That Light Feeling Under Your Feet was a Calgary Bestseller & finalist for two poetry awards. Kayla is co-editor of Cadence Voix Feminines Female Voices, a multilingual poetry anthology. Holding an MA in English, Creative Writing, she has worked as a technical editor on Canada’s largest pipeline projects & written courseware for Air Traffic Controllers. A passionate leader in the literary arts, Kayla fosters inclusive, healthy writing communities & lifestyles. In 2021, she received a Top 20 Under 40 Award for her outstanding dedication to the literary arts.
an east coast entrepreneur
Writers commune with place & my home, Moncton, is a writer’s refuge. Small, natural, fluid in landscape & tongue, our most abundant commodity is time. Life is slower here; we are hardworking, friendly & caring. These values are a part of my business. I care about my clients, I give you my time. My clients are writers of all levels & genres, self-publishers, women in business & public life, entrepreneurs & small businesses, non-profits, academics & students—anyone who needs assistance with documentation or writing projects. I am here so that you can be heard & change the world.
Write you.
Winner of the 2021 Moncton Chamber of Commerce Top 20 Under 40 Award!
Honouring young leaders & innovators who are making a difference
in Greater Moncton’s economy, arts & culture!
It’s an amazing experience to be honoured by your city, but it’s even better when you can celebrate that with the fabulous Zina Aljaratli of Surreal Design & Claire Kelly-Orozco of Claire the and World Immigration Consulting Inc.
INTERVIEWS
“Moncton’s Poet Laureate Crosses Many Cultures”
Buzz Local TV – February 6, 2020
Kayla Geitzler is Moncton’s Poet Laureate. Her role is to put into poetic text the mood & feeling of Moncton. Cultures from around the world give voice to their communities in such a way. Kayla brings this idea to places like schools and the Frye Festival. Soon she’ll be expanding her reach collaborating with the Arab community and their poets as well as embarking on an ambitious project. Kayla visited us in the studio to tell us all about it.
Watch the interview here!
“We Are Diamonds”
L.E.A.D. with Reem – April 2020
My “We Are Diamonds” interview with fellow writer, Lebanese-Canadian poet, brilliant Life Coach & community leader, Reem Fayyad Abdel Samad. We talked about my experiences in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic & my perspective of the pandemic as a writer. “OMG I wish I could be as bored as everyone else!” may have been a really accurate account of what Covid-19 has been like for me.
DIGITAL INTERVIEWS
CBC: 14 Poets to Watch for in 2018
Poetry Grrrowl: THAT LIGHT FEELING UNDER YOUR FEET + Kayla Geitzler – All Lit Up
NB Poet Laureate says Pandemic Proving to be ‘kind of renaissance for writers in Canada’ – Aya Al-Hakim, Global News
LITERARY READINGS & ATTIC OWL READING SERIES EVENTS
“CONFINEMENT”
festival Frye Festival Opening – April 2020
During April & August each year of our mandates, Jean-Philippe Raiche and I transform from Poets Laureate to Poets Flyee to compose & co-host for the Frye Festival. The Frye was one of the first literary festivals to transition to a virtual format in 2020 & we were tasked with exploring the changes & anxieties the pandemic had brought to our communities.
“Mr. Sexy… The Giraffe”
One of my oldest and dearest friends, artist Amy Miller, took this video of me reading my teenage poetry at Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids. She would have remembered my teenage dreams of becoming “a real poet”. It was a great night. Formally trained poets are discouraged from losing their composure, but the audience was infectious. I turned into Morty Smith, “Awww geez.”
Attic Owl, December 2020 Event
The Attic Owl Reading Series closed 2020 with an Open Mic event featuring writers from the UK, Quebec, Nova Scotia & New Brunswick. I read last. Click on the Facebook link to watch!
A moving Attic Owl Event
During 2020, one of the things we missed most as writers was the interaction we receive from our audiences. I was so pleased that this was such a special & moving evening (despite my technical inexperience). Click on the Facebook link to watch!
Publications
CADENCE VOIX FEMININES FEMALE VOICES
FROG HOLLOW PRESS, 2020
As a high school student, I wanted to one day publish a bilingual anthology of female New Brunswick poets. Eighteen years later, my good friend Elizabeth Blanchard partnered with me & we expanded my original vision to create Cadence. A multilingual translation anthology of female New Brunswick poets. The first publication of its kind in our province, it covers featuring the art of the incredible Nancy King Schofield.
Cadence is a poetry anthology featuring twenty-five accomplished women, non-binary, trans-writers & translators who are indigenous to, or have settled, in the land now known as New Brunswick, Canada. This edition features poetry in Arabic, English, French, German & Vietnamese. Cadence is about the energy & movement of language in NB. Even the word itself, cadence, possesses an interlingual fluidity….
a word that in French is feminine, as is the word langue, as are the voices in this collection, des voix féminines…voices of women poets who, like their “many-a-mothers” before them, have always been here, or who, by desire or circumstance, have settled here. Each write from a unique linguistic, social & cultural perspective. Our literature is this “being”, a cadence of threads & currents, blood & culture, history tangled in future. We live in & on the tongue.
Co-editors Kayla Geitzler & Elizabeth Blanchard
Cadence took 18 months to complete & despite the pandemic, we were determined to celebrate our incredible achievement with all the women who had so generously contributed their work. We were thrilled that the Frye Festival partnered with us for the launch.
THAT LIGHT FEELING UNDER YOUR FEET
NeWest Press, 2018
Finalist: 2018 AB Publishers’ award
finalist: 2018 nb book awards poetry prize
bestseller: city of calgary
That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts. Kayla Geitzler’s debut collection interprets isolation, alienation, racism, and assimilation into the margins as inevitable consequences for the seafaring workforce of the most profitable sector of the tourism industry. No mere three-hour tour, That Light Feeling Under Your Feet is an unflinching portrait of life at sea, and the discrimination, racism, and misogyny inherent in the tourism industry. Darkly humorous and deftly realized, the poems in That Light Feeling Under Your Feet stick in the mind like ‘endless leviathans’ harnessing the controlled chaos of the word.” ~ Jim Johnstone, author of The Chemical Life “Like a workaday Virgil, Kayla Geitzler takes us from the upper decks of rum cocktails, jackpot bingo, and conga lines into the underworkings of cruise ships — the sale-to-sail palliative powers of simulacrum, the trinket-exhausted ports, and the forced smiles of deck staff under a manager’s beady gaze. In poem after startling poem, Geitzler’s sustained meditation forces our attention back to this absurd microcosm, proving herself a provocative emissary to frantic mass tourism.” ~ Tammy Armstrong, author of Take Us Quietly Reviews: All Lit Up: Chappy Hour & Rad Women of Canadian Poetry Something in the Water: Kayla Geitzler’s That Light Feeling Under Your Feet
Kayla Geitzler 