Join Kevin Spenst and Betsy Warland for a conversation on alternative forms of writing, literary practice, and approaches to language, drawing on Spenst’s Gathered Together in the Stanley Park Manor, a work that explores memory, place, and the layered lives that shape community and shared space. Kevin will also discuss his plans for his residency at the Koerner Library.
Location: HSBC Hall, UBC Robson Square
Type: In Conversation
Sponsored By: Word Vancouver · UBC Koerner Library
Moderator: Betsy Warland, Off the Map (co-editor with Seema Shah and Kate Bird; Bell Press)
Reading: Kevin Spenst, Gathered Together in the Stanley Park Manor: A Collective History (Anvil Press)
About The Moderator
Betsy Warland
Author, editor, mentor, and teacher, Betsy Warland has published 13 books of creative nonfiction and poetry. The second edition of Warland’s 2010 book of essays on writing, Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books), came out with ten new essays in 2023. Warland’s 1987 book, serpent (w)rite, (Coach House Press), was likely one of the foreruners of CNF. Along with her BA in Visual Art, Warland draws upon music composition strategies. In 2022, a street opera composed by Lloyd Burritt, based on her 2016 CNF book, Oscar of Between, was premiered in Vancouver. Over the past few years, Warland has been working with Vancouver writers with lived experience of mental health issues. A Westcoast first: Off the Map, co-edited Seema Shah, Kate Bird and Warland, will be published in June, 2025 by Bell Press. Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016. In 2021, an annual national prize, The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, is announced yearly at the Vancouver Writers Festival.Word Vancouver · UBC Koerner Library
About The Reader
Kevin Spenst
Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of four full-length books of poetry and 19 chapbooks. An assortment of his lyric essays, interviews with his neighbours, and personal accounts from others make up the collection Stanley Park Manor: a Collective History (Anvil Press, 2026) He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is one of the poetry ambassadors for Vancouver’s 2025-2027 Poet Laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner. He is one of the Poetry Mentors at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.
