Join Massy Arts Society on Sunday, September 10th at 3pm for the next Dead Poets Reading Series, as deep threads of connection and solidarity are drawn between local, contemporary poets and a diverse array of poets from the past. We welcome you to an afternoon reflection and celebration, as poetic conversation and recitation travel through time. Registration is free/by donation, open to all and required for entrance.
Location: Massy Arts 23 East Pender Street
Type: Poetry
Hosts: Elena Johnson · Kevin Spenst
Readers: Kim Trainor | Natalie Lim | Bronwen Tate | Brandon Wint
About The Hosts
Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), poems set at a remote research station in the Yukon. She works as an editor and writing mentor on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, and is a co-editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021). The French translation of her book was published in 2021 and won the John Glassco Prize. This summer she was a writer-in-residence at the Al Purdy A-frame in Ontario.
Kevin Spenst is the author of three full-length books of poetry, which includes Hearts Amok: A Memoir in Verse (Anvil Press, 2020), plus the upcoming A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024) along with over a dozen chapbooks including Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press), Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), and Recto Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers (co-written with Joshua Pitre for Collusion Books). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University, and lives in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory.
About The Readers
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Her second book of poetry, Ledi, was a finalist for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award. A thin fire runs through me appeared with icehouse poetry / Gooselane Editions in 2023. A blueprint for survival | poems will appear with Guernica in 2024. Her poetry films, created with the musician Hazel Fairbairn, have screened at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2020 and the 9th International Film Festival in Athens, Greece, 2021. Ledi was performed live as part of the “Assembly” exhibit at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster in Fall, 2021. Recent poems have appeared in Otoliths, Anthropocenes, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Ecocene, ISLE, and Ecozon@. Her poetry has also been anthologized in Dark Mountain (UK) and Fire Season I and II (Vancouver). Her poetry film "Hwlhits'um | Signs," is part of the installation “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC, that features contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders. Kim lives in Vancouver, traditional homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations.
Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, B.C.). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, arrhythmia, was published in 2022 by Rahila’s Ghost Press.
Brandon Wint is a poet, spoken word artist and multi-disciplinary storyteller based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon Wint's poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. His debut film, My Body Is A Poem/The World Makes With Me screened at DOXA documentary film festival in 2023.
