Join Massy Arts Society on Sunday, September 8th at 3 pm for the next Dead Poets Reading Series, as deep threads of connection and solidarity are drawn between local, contemporary poets and a diverse array of poets from the past. We welcome you to an afternoon of reflection and celebration, as poetic conversation and recitation travel through time. Registration is free/by donation, open to all and required for entrance.
Location: Massy Arts, 23 E Pender St, Vancouver
Type: Poetry, Reading
Presented by: Word Vancouver · Dead Poets Reading Series
Hosts: Elena Johnson | Raoul Fernandes
Featured Poets:
Jónína Kirton presents Lucille Clifton
Rita Wong presents Dr. Refaat Alareer
Rahat Kurd presents Parveen Shakir
Alan Hill presents Charles Tomlinson
About The Hosts
Elena Johnson
Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau Press), a collection of poems written at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally, and has been set to music and performed by choirs in Vancouver and Brooklyn. The French translation of her book, Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine (tr. Luba Markovskaia), was published by Jardin de givre in 2021 and won the John Glassco Prize. A finalist for the CBC Literary Awards and the Alfred G. Bailey Poetry Prize, she works as an editor and writing mentor in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She is one of the editors of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021). In 2023, she was a Writer in Residence at the Al Purdy A-frame in Ontario.
Raoul Fernandes
Raoul Fernandes lives with his wife and two sons on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). His first collection of poems, Transmitter and Receiver (Nightwood Editions, 2015) won the Dorothy Livesay Award and the Debut-litzer Award for Poetry in 2016. He is the Poetry Editor for EVENT Magazine and has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including the Best of the Best Canadian Poetry 2017. He works in public libraries in Vancouver.
About The Poets
Jónína Kirton
Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Treaty 1, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis. She graduated from the SFU Writer's Studio in 2007 and since that time has published three books with Talonbooks. She was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, was released in 2022. It merges poetry and lyrical memoir to take us on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on her Métis family. She currently lives in New Westminster BC, the unceded territory of the Qayqayt Nation and other down river Coast Salish Nations, a hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking people. Although she acknowledges and is thankful for the teachings offered through academic institutions, she leans heavily into what some term ‘other ways of knowing’. Her writing is often a weaving of body and land as she firmly believes until we care for women’s bodies we will not care for the earth.
Rita Wong
Rita Wong lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories, also known as Vancouver, where she attends to questions of respect for water, decolonization, ecology and climate justice. Co-editor of the anthology Downstream: Reimagining Water (2017) with Dorothy Christian, Wong is the author of current, climate (2021), beholden (2018, with Fred Wah), undercurrent (2015), perpetual (2015, with Cindy Mochizuki), sybil unrest (2008, with Larissa Lai), forage (winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011 and short-listed for the 2008 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry), and monkeypuzzle (1998). She has received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award.
Rahat Kurd
Rahat Kurd, a poet and cultural critic based in Vancouver, is currently at work on The Book of Z, her second book of poetry. Kurd is a close reader who draws on multilingual poetics and the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. Her most recent essay, "Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali" was published in river in an ocean: essays on translation (Ed. Nuzhat Abbas, trace press: Toronto, 2023). Her book The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021), is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five-year period with poet Sumayya Syed. Cosmophilia (Talonbooks 2015) was her first book of poems.
