From encrypted histories and systemic weight to ancestral echoes and quiet acts of gratitude, this poetry reading brings together four distinct yet intertwined voices in Canadian literature. Join us for an evening that opens the silences, gives shape to resilience, and asks what it means to carry stories through the body and beyond.
Location: Poetry Tent, UBC Robson Square
Host: Renée Saklikar
Readers: Arleen Paré, Encrypted (Caitlin Press) | Junie Désil, allostatic load (Talonbooks) | Joseph Dandurand, I Would Like to Say Thank You (Nightwood Editions) | Isabella Wang, November, November(Nightwood Editions)
About The Host
Renee Sarojini Saklikar
words
About The Readers
Arleen Pare
Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer with ten collections of poetry, one chapbook and one anthology. She’s been short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay BC Award, and has won the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Prize, the bpnichol Chapbook Award, the American Golden Crown Award for Lesbian Poetry, twice, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry. She lives with her wife, Chris Fox, in Victoria on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people. May 2025
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.
Joseph Dandurand
Isabella Wang
Isabella Wang is the author of Pebble Swing (Nightwood, 2021), a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, November, Novvember (Nightwood Editions 2025), and the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc's Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and Long Poem Contest, Minola Review’s Inaugural Poetry Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Wang’s poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and five anthologies. She directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, Revise-Revision Street. She was named a Writers' Trust Rising Star in 2025.
