Books BC and Read Local BC present 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!

The Poetry in Transit project is a collaboration between Books BC, TransLink, and BC Transit. This project is made possible due to the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, Canada Council for the Arts, Creative BC, and the City of Vancouver.

Location: Poetry Tent, UBC Robson Square

Presented by: Word Vancouver; Read Local BC

Type: Readings + Discussion/Q&A

Host: Elee Kraljii Gardiner

About The Host

Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor whose award-winning books of poetry include Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and three chapbooks: Residence, WATCHER with Gary Barwin, and Trauma Head: the medical file. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Originally from Boston, she lives in Canada where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors. eleekg.com

About The Readers

Susan Alexander

Susan Alexander’s poems have appeared in Canadian and international anthologies and literary magazines, such as The Southern Review, Pangyrus, Arc and Grain. Her most recent publication is Berberitzen with Raven Chapbooks (2024). She is the author of two full collections, Nothing You Can Carry (2020) and The Dance Floor Tilts (2017) with Thistledown Press. Her poetry has won multiple awards, including the 2022 Vancouver’s City Poem Prize. She has hosted poetry readings and panels for the Federation of BC Writers and Victoria’s Festival of Writers. Susan lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people.

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.

Tom Wayman

Tom Wayman’s prolific literary career includes writing more than twenty poetry collections, three collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction and a novel, as well as editing six poetry anthologies. He received British Columbia’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the literary arts. In 2015, he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their daily employment. He won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards prize for fiction in 2016 (for the short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love) and for poetry in 2023 (for Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time). His memoir, The Road to Appledore (or How I Went Back to The Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place), was published in 2024. Wayman lives in Winlaw, BC, and his website is ww.tomwayman.com.

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