Award-winning poet, USask grad explores queerness and identity

A love of languages led Leah Horlick (BA'10) to a career as an award-winning queer poet and author.

Horlick found her passion for words while majoring in languages and linguistics at the University of Saskatchewan (USask).

“I like all the words,” she said. “I loved the languages and linguistics program. I’m just a word nerd, sound nerd.”

Since 2012, Horlick has published three books of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012), For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015) and Moldovan Hotel (Brick Books, 2021). Her work has largely focused on sharing her experiences and exploring her identity as a queer, Jewish woman.

Riot Lung, a collection of poems Horlick wrote as a teenager, was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. For Your Own Good was named a 2016 Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. The same year, she also received the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, an award for 2SLGBTQIA+ emerging writers in Canada.

Horlick grew up on Treaty Six Territory as a settler in northeast rural Saskatchewan before moving to Saskatoon. While attending high school at Aden Bowman, she had the opportunity to take German classes with teacher James Funk. The head start allowed her to start taking 200-level language classes with Dr. Silke Falkner (PhD) when she started at USask.

“I was interested in taking German because two of my grandparents grew up in Yiddish-speaking families, and those languages are closely related” she said. Learning another language piqued her curiosity in diving into the origins of the words people use in their everyday vocabulary.

Growing up, Horlick had supportive and queer-friendly parents and the opportunity to access free writing programs through the Saskatoon Public Library with authors like Beth Goobie.. As a result, much of her writing, education and research were influenced by her identity.

“A lot of my research was related to my own time in university,” she said. “Things have really changed in many ways in the queer community.”

Because Horlick looks and presents in a more feminine, or femme, way, she and other femmes in her peer group encountered disbelief from queer and straight people based on stereotypes of how queer women should look like.

“When I look back on my early academic work, I was working on developing that vocabulary for myself,” she said. “Whereas, I think now we have a lot more flexibility and talking about being femme as a valid queer identity that doesn’t necessarily exist in opposition to masculine people.”

Horlick added that her professors in many Women’s and Gender Studies classes helped her access resources and media that explored queer topics. She remembers queer theory courses and a research trip to New York City with Dr. Marie Lovrod (PhD), and a feminist art history class with Dr. Joan Borsa (PhD), as formative influences.  

Few undergraduate students decide to take on a voluntary thesis project when pursuing a bachelor’s degree. However, Horlick took the opportunity to explore the use of how slang terminology impacts queer women’s understanding of their genitalia, with the support of Languages & Linguistics professor Dr. Veronika Makarova (PhD).

“I also won a Peter T. Millard award for LGBT research for a paper on semantics and the use of the terms ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ in the queer community,” Horlick said. “That really got me interested in more about lexicology and queer communities.”

After graduating from USask in 2010, Horlick moved to Vancouver to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC), supervised by Canadian poet Rhea Tregebov.

Her second collection, For Your Own Good, was her thesis project for her Master’s degree. Based on personal experiences, the book focused on the issue of intimate partner violence in the queer community, specifically sexual violence between queer women and lesbians.

This project also led to direct opportunities to work with anti-domestic violence groups in the Lower Mainland like the Ending Violence Association of BC, which provided healthy relationship education to young, queer women. Through this work, Horlick said she also had the opportunity to train crisis line volunteers and raise awareness among OBGYNs on how to look for signs of intimate partner violence between women.

"I've gotten a lot of messages from social workers and other service providers who work with people directly impacted by this issue,” she said. “They have shared with me that it really helps to have a semi-autobiographical resource to share with clients. So that was really, really special.”

Her third collection of poems, Moldovan Hotel, explores what it means to be a Jewish person who isn’t always perceived to be Jewish, Horlick explained. She explores the Romanian Holocaust along with related global themes of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. Seven years of research and a large trip to Romania and Moldova, which is where her grandmother’s family is from, helped inform the book. The book went on to be shortlisted for a number of awards after publication.

"I felt a lot more nervous about this book in some ways than I did before,” she said. “This is a huge part of my life.”

After graduating, Horlick lived in Vancouver for about 10 years. After moving back to Saskatchewan, Horlick was the 2022/23 Canadian Writer-In-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary. The position is split between facilitating free community engagement events and focusing on personal projects.

Two years ago, Horlick moved back to Saskatoon again, to be closer to her family. She’s also working on her new, upcoming novel about a queer retelling of a stage play based on a famous Jewish folktale called, The Dybbuk.

“(It’s) kind of like a poltergeist who has a terrible habit of possessing people on the night of their wedding, or in the middle of their wedding ceremony,” Horlick laughed.

She had pieces of advice for students interested in pursuing a career in writing.

“Persist,” she said. “Keep doing it and disregard traditional writing advice that doesn’t work for you. Don’t get stressed about things like word count, or a regular routine, and get really comfortable doing the same thing over and over again without any results.

“It takes a long time. Everything’s going to take longer than you think it will,” she added. “And it doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong, which is super counterintuitive to everything else in life. The most important thing is that you’re doing it whether or anybody else likes it.”

For students who are exploring their gender identities and sexual orientations, Horlick recommended accessing resources at USask and in the community.

“There were just so many free and accessible things to me during my time on campus as a queer student,” Horlick said. “I think the important thing is to not be afraid to take advantage of those resources. Don’t feel like you’re not ‘queer enough,’ or taking up somebody else’s spot, or that ‘somebody else needs it more than me.’”