Two poets at different stages of their careers come together to explore identity, memory, labour, and place. Russell Thornton’s Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000–2025 gathers twenty-five years of work marked by emotional precision and attentiveness to the human and natural worlds. Christina Shah’s if: prey, then: huntress draws on experiences in the mining industry to examine power, vulnerability, and survival. Together, these poets show how language can uncover resilience, beauty, and connection in unexpected places.
Location: Poetry Tent, UBC Robson Square
Host: Rob Taylor, Weather (Gaspereau Press)
Readers: Russell Thornton, Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000–2025 (Harbour Publishing) | Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress: poems (Nightwood Editions)
About The Host
Rob Taylor
Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News, and the editor of the anthologies 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, where he also runs the Fraser Valley Writers Festival, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
About The Readers
Russell Thornton
Russell Thornton is a Canadian poet with ten published collections. His latest, Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025, was released by Harbour Publishing in spring 2026. His Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (2013) was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. The Hundred Lives (2014) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His other titles are The Fifth Window (2000); A Tunisian Notebook (2002); House Built of Rain (2003), shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry; The Human Shore (2006); The Broken Face (2018); Answer to Blue (2021); and The White Light of Tomorrow (2023). Thornton’s poetry has appeared in many anthologies, among them the Best Canadian Poetry series (2012 and 2019), and has been selected several times for BC’s Poetry in Transit; it has also appeared in translation in anthologies and literary journals in Greece, Romania, Israel, and Ukraine. He lives in North Vancouver, BC.
Christina Shah
Christina Shah lives in New Westminster and works in heavy industry, where she drinks from the firehose of knowledge. Her poetry has appeared numerous Canadian literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, Vallum, Arc, Grain, PRISM international, EVENT, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review and elsewhere. Her poem, ‘they canned a good man today’, was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. Her poem, ‘interior bar, 1986’, was selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2023. She is one-fifth of the Harbour Centre 5 poetry collective, whose chapbook, Brine, was released in 2022. Her first videopoem, ‘rig veda’ (in collaboration with videographer Mark Mushet), was translated into Spanish and screened at the 2023 Cinemística festival in Granada, Spain, and the 2023 Versi Di Luce festival in Modica, Sicily. rig veda, her first solo chapbook (Anstruther Press), was released in 2023. if: prey, then: huntress (Nightwood Editions, 2025) is her first full-length collection. She has some strong opinions on soft pretzels.
