Sylvie Hill

ARTS | CULTURE BIO

Polite, refined and elegant? Try honest, irreverent and sassy. She wrote about arts, entertainment, culture and sex in the same punchy, conversational style that she used to entertain her live audiences during her spoken-word performances.

Her motto: Follow what you love and you won’t get lost. Reach out to people who can take you there. This passion-first resolve and a desire to connect with an audience had earned Sylvie a local profile as a fiery writer and performer in Ottawa, Canada’s Capital City. Her literary works, journalism, television/radio/festival appearances and uOttawa courses plugged you into the world of smart and cool.

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Sylvie Hill was born in Calgary, Alberta and moved to Ottawa in 1979, at the age of five. She studied English Literature at the University of Ottawa, and received a Master’s degree in English Literature & Language from Carleton University (1999). Her research focus was on sexual frustration, masturbation and artistic failure in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sylvie created courses for the University of Ottawa’s former Personal Enrichment Activities program in the Centre for Continuing Education, on James Joyce, female sexuality and awakenings. She also created a course on the French music of Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg. She is currently creating a course on nature in novels.

She’s worked in the education field as a university arts reporter and college instructor. For near two decades, her day job has been in internal and external communications, writing, and strategic planning for the Government of Canada (building science, green technologies/sustainable communities, natural resources, environment-water, information technology). She has taken two career sabbaticals to boost her skills, and diversify her work experience to build on her private-sector work in the arts/cultural fields. These breaks from the federal government included work as a Public Information Officer for the Ottawa Public Library for 11 months in 2016-2017, and Communications Specialist for 9 months CBC/Radio-Canada in 2018-2019.

Sylvie’s cultural columns, editorials, book reviews and music features have appeared in several places, including The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa XPress, Hour Montreal, and in magazines such as The Face (U.K.) and Toronto’s Lola Art Magazine. She’s also contributied to The Sound of Confusion on-line music blog, and Four Culture Magazine.

Toronto magazines, including INK! and Sam Hyate’s Blood & Aphorisms’ Literary Babes Issue 2002, have published her poetry, along with Ottawa magazines such as The Algonquin Roundtable Review, Bywords and Pervert COMIX (the once-comic of Gavin McInnes of VICE).

Sylvie has worked in community radio (CHUO 89.1 FM) and lent her voice to local commercial radio. She’s emceed several local events, including WESTFEST and was host (2007-2009) of the Ottawa chapter of Mustaches for Kids’ annual fundraising (Make a Wish Foundation). In 2011, she had the honour of emceeing Amnesty International’s 50th Anniversary Celebration and the 9th Annual Write For Rights at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

She is also the national television host of the reality dating series, The Letters: Rediscovering the Art of Courtship.

And following her first self-published book of spoken-word poetry called Hoxton Square Circles: Starfucking tales of sexless one-night stands, she has published her second collection with the art of Juan Carlos Noria (aka dixon) called Russell Square Station: mine the trash thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $6,233.