In partnership with TransLink and BC Transit, Read Local BC and Creative BC, Publishers BC presents the launch of this year’s Poetry In Transit campaign at Word Vancouver. Now celebrating its 29th year, this beloved community-engagement project displays the work of ten BC poets on public transit vehicles throughout the province. Join us to hear a selection of the featured 2025-26 poets read from their work, followed by a short discussion and Q&A in which you can engage with the poets over your love of the written verse!

Location: Poetry Tent, UBC Robson Square

Sponsored by: Association of Book Publishers of BC and Creative BC

Moderator: Elee Kraljii Gardiner

About The Readers

Joseph Kidney

Joseph Kidney won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry, the Poem of the Year award from Arc, the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2. His poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and elsewhere. Following Terra Firma, Pharma Sea, a chapbook published with Anstruther Press, his full-length debut, Devotional Forensics, was published with icehouse poetry in 2025. He currently works as a lecturer in the Civic, Liberal and Global Education program at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in Renaissance drama.

Junie Désil

Junie Désil is a poet born to Haitian immigrant parents. Her debut poetry collection, Eat Salt | Gaze at the Ocean (TalonBooks, 2020), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She currently lives on the territories of the Homalco, Tla’amin, and Klahoose. allostatic load (Talon Books, 2025), is her second collection.

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).

Natalie Lim

Natalie Lim (she/her) is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the author of a full-length book of poetry, Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) and a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022). Winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s Emerging Writer Award, her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry and elsewhere.

Calvin Wharton

Calvin Wharton has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry in Canada, the U.S., Wales, Sweden and Denmark. A former chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College and editor of Event magazine, he has also been writer in residence at the University of Wales and had a Coracle Europe literary residency in Sweden. His books include a collection of short fiction and two collections of poetry, most recently This Here Paradise.

Jen Currin

Jen Currin has published two collections of stories, Disembark (House of Anansi, 2024) and Hider/Seeker (Anvil Press, 2018), which was a finalist for a ReLit Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. They have also published five collections of poetry, including Trinity Street (House of Anansi, 2023) and The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for a LAMBDA and two other awards. Currin lives on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Halkomelem-speaking peoples, including the Qayqayt, Musqueam, Kwikwetlem, and Kwantlen Nations, in New Westminster, BC. They teach creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor living in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of two poetry books, Trauma Head, and serpentine loop. She is also editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational art installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Elee directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, an online program pairing authors with mentors, and is the seventh poet laureate of Vancouver. eleekg.com

Renée Harper

Renée Harper (she/they) is a writer, artist and professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Selkirk College, located on Sinixt territory in Nelson, BC. Harper studied painting and creative writing at the Kootenay School of the Arts and holds a PhD in Canadian Literature from York University. Her academic research focuses on the ongoing settler-colonial making and unmaking of place on Syilx territory in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. At Selkirk College, Renée co-founded the Black Bear Review and currently serves as a faculty adviser. She is passionate about teaching and the creative and intellectual breakthroughs that happen within learning environments.

Publishers BC, Translink Poetry Bus

Tending the Unspoken

Poetry of All Places