Horlick was sexually assaulted at the age of 19 by her partner in her lesbian relationship. “I am uniquely situated to explore these themes based on my years of work in the anti-violence field, and my own recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder,” she says. Horlick also intends to work on her fourth collection of poetry during her residency, tentatively titled Night, which will touch on themes of betrayal, intimacy, and mental illness. She admits that she’s nervous, pursuing her first work of fiction and she’s grateful that her CDWP residency will afford her the time and resources she needs to take this literary risk. Horlick says she’s drawn to the story by its themes of bodily autonomy and “the lengths that people in love are willing to go to.”

“Yiddish theatre tends to be a bit dark.” “Of course, it doesn’t work out and they both die,” Horlick adds with a laugh. “The man she’s hoping to marry dies and becomes a dybbuk, which is a malicious spirit, and to be with her, he possesses her. “It’s about a woman who is hoping to marry for love - which was very unusual at the time - and she is not able to, due to the various designs of her family,” says Horlick. Ansky called The Dybbuk, which debuted in 1920. She is planning to develop her debut novel, a work of experimental literary fiction based on a famous Yiddish play by S. 17 at cSpace King Edward Studio Theatre - plans to explore her ancestry even further during her residency. Horlick - who will be appearing at the CDWP’s annual Hello/Goodbye event Oct. It was also named a Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association.

Her previous book, For Your Own Good (2015), was a collection of semi-autobiographical poems centred around a violent lesbian relationship and it put Horlick on the literary map in a major way, earning her the prestigious Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Canada’s top emerging LGBTQ2S+ writers. It was a marked departure for Horlick, the 2022-23 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for UCalgary’s esteemed, long-running Calgary Distinguished Writers Program (CDWP). With searing clarity and craft, her poems ran the gamut from revolution and genocide to cultural politics and gender. The trip inspired her third poetry collection, Moldovan Hotel (2021), an ambitious work informed by the history Horlick uncovered, but also packed with cutting contemporary insights connecting the past to the present. In 2017, poet Leah Horlick took a trip to Romania, to retrace the steps of her Jewish ancestors who had fled persecution at the hands of both Nazi and Soviet regimes.

For Your Own Good by Leah Horlick