St. Albert poet laureate receives Alumni Horizon Award

University of Alberta alumna and 2022-24 St. Albert poet laureate Lauren Seal is a recipient of the 2024 U of A Alumni Horizon Award. As an assistant director of YouthWrite and a volunteer for its Spoken Word Youth Choir (SWYC), Seal helps “youth and teens to find their own voice” through writing.

Despite not pursing poetry in university, Seal said her university experience allowed her to “explore [her] voice through creative non-fiction writing” and lay the groundwork for her writing career.

Seal joined YouthWrite as a teen to develop her writing. “It was a very empowering experience,” she said. “It was one of the first places where people were taking my writing seriously. Previously, I felt like nobody noticed me.”

Now, as a mentor with the organization, Seal finds it rewarding to “watch everyone in SWYC grow and see how they change as writers.”

“It’s incredible to watch teens find their own voice, their own confidence, and then watch them just blossom,” Seal said.

Being a poet laureate “was one of the best opportunities of my life,” Seal says

As the 2022-24 poet laureate for St. Albert, Seal’s responsibilities included writing poetry, poetry readings, and community engagement. Her tenure as poet laureate was the city’s first in-person version of the role following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I felt a lot of responsibility being the first full in-person poet laureate,” she said. “It was such a huge opportunity for me, especially relatively early in my writing career.”

“I also wanted to make sure to show the possibilities of the poet laureate role,” Seal said.

Seal credited the role with launching her writing career. She described the experience as “one of the best opportunities of [her] life.”

Light Enough to Float, Seal’s first novel, was published by Rocky Pond Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House in October. It follows a young girl’s journey through anorexia recovery. The book started as a poem based on her own experience with hospitalization for anorexia, which she first performed as part of SWYC.

Seal’s writing is inspired by “capturing a feeling or a moment in poetry,” she said.

“I just wrote a poem about my own experience with being hospitalized as a teenager with anorexia. It was all about how books really were the thing that comforted me during that very awful and difficult process. I used books as a form of escapism, reading almost any chance I could just so I could not mentally be in the hospital,” she said.

The release of her first book is has been a “surreal experience,” she said.

“I never thought that I would get published, or at least not to this extent. It feels both incredibly intimidating and very exciting.”