Join us at our new venue, Outsiders and Others Gallery, for the next Dead Poets Reading Series, a longstanding event in which four local writers share the work of dead poets they admire. We look forward to sharing an afternoon of reflection and celebration, as poetic conversation and recitation travel through time. The gallery and washrooms are wheelchair accessible, and close to the Vancouver City Centre SkyTrain Station. Masks are required.
Location: Outsiders and Others Gallery, 938 Howe St, Vancouver
Hosts: Elena Johnson · Lauren Peat
Readers: Carleigh Baker presents Anne Sexton | Hope Lauterbach presents W.B. Yeats | Adrienne Drobnies presents George Oppen | Rob Taylor presents Danny Peart
Elena Johnson
Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems set at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poems have been translated into French, set to music, and sung by choirs. She works as an editor and writing mentor on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver. She’s currently working on a new series of ecopoems.
Lauren Peat
Lauren Peat's debut poetry chapbook, Future Tense, was published by Baseline Press in 2024. Her poems, essays, and translations from French have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Only Poems, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, The Seventh Wave, and World Literature Today, among other places. Her many collaborations with composers are also featured in the repertoire of acclaimed vocal ensembles across North America. Translation Editor of the online poetry magazine Volume, she lives on the traditional, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC).
About The Readers
Carleigh Baker
CARLEIGH BAKER is an author and mentor of Cree-Métis and European descent. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. Baker's newest collection, Last Woman, is now out with McClelland & Stewart, and has been shortlisted for the 2025 Jim Deva award for writing that provokes. As a teacher and researcher, she is particularly interested in how contemporary fiction can be used to address the climate crisis.
Hope Lauterbach
Hope Lauterbach is a Zambian Canadian writer and poet, and founder of the Unbound Reading Series, an annual literary event that highlights Black writers. Her work has been commissioned for the Fraser Valley Literary Festival, and appears in Contemporary Verse 2, emerge 21: The Writer's Studio anthology, and Pearls. Hope currently resides in that place between sleep and awake, and is working on her first poetry manuscript.
Adrienne Drobnies
Adrienne Drobnies is a poet and scientist living in Vancouver on the territories of the Coast Salish people. Her first book of poetry Salt and Ashes won the Fred Kerner Award from the Canadian Authors Association. Her poem “Randonnées” won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award and was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Prize. She is an editor of the anthology Standing on High Ground about the resistance to the TMX pipeline expansion. She is currently working on a second book of poetry.
Rob Taylor
Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
