Kelowna Poet Selected for National Residency Program

A Kelowna woman has been selected to participate in a prestigious artist-in-residence program in Toronto.

Poet Nancy Holmes is one of five people selected to participate in the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence program for 2016. This is the second year of the program, which provides professional artists with accommodation and studio space at the former residence of renowned Canadian artist Doris McCarthy.

When Doris McCarthy donated her property to the Ontario Heritage Trust, her vision was for other artists to have the opportunity to live and work at the site that inspired so much of her own artistic expression.

The five artists selected to participate in the 2016 program are:

• Nancy Holmes, a poet from Kelowna, British Columbia
• Rachel MacFarlane, a painter, collage artist and digital animator from Toronto, Ontario
• Kathy Stinson, an author of children's literature and other works from Rockwood, Ontario
• Ehryn Torrell, a painter and mixed-media artist from Newmarket, Ontario, now based in London, UK
• Winnie Truong, a visual artist specializing in pencil drawings from Toronto, Ontario.

Doris McCarthy (1910-2010) was one of Canada's most recognized landscape painters of the second half of the 20th century.

Holmes has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (Ronsdale 2012). This book is a collection of poems about the place, people, plants and animals of the Okanagan Valley