Lunch Poems presents Chantal Gibson & Marion Quednau

Lunch Poems at SFU is a unique opportunity to celebrate the spoken word held the third Wednesday of every month, from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., in the Teck Gallery at Simon Fraser University's Vancouver Campus.

The raison d'être of Lunch Poems is to invite and welcome everyone to enjoy poetry in a relaxed and casual atmosphere: whether you are new to poetry or have had a long romance with it. We invite you to join us to lunch on words and feed your soul. No fees or registration. Just bring your lunch, curiosity, open mind and love of words.

Since our inaugural poetry reading on March 28, 2012 featuring Vancouver's Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau, Lunch Poems has hosted a wide range of poets and their works reflecting the rich diversity of the poetry scene in our community.

Chantal Gibson is an artist-educator interested in the cultural production of knowledge. Her work explores the overlap between literary and visual art, challenging imperialist notions quietly embedded in everyday things—from history books to kitschy souvenir spoons. Her visual art has appeared at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Open Space art centre in Victoria. Her first book How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019) is an auto-biocritical extension of her artistic practice. Sculpting black text against a white page, her poems forge new spaces that bend English grammar rules while confronting historic representations of black womanhood and Otherness in the Canadian cultural imagination. Her work has been published in Room magazine and Making Room: 40 years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017), and she was shortlisted for PRISM magazine’s 2017 Poetry Prize. An award-winning teacher, she teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Marion Quednau’s poetry has been short-listed for CBC’s Poetry Prize and has won a chapbook award (Kissing: Selected Chronicles, League of Canadian Poets), the Malahat Long Poem Prize and a National Magazine Award. Her work’s distinctive voice linking disparate elements has been lauded as “an abundance of genuine insights and truths” with evident “joy in the writing.” Her prose has also received critical acclaim, including the Smithbooks-Books in Canada First Novel Award. She has taught creative writing in B.C. school districts from Delta to Telegraph Creek, in workshops for SFU, UBC and UFV, and at various literary festivals. Marion will be reading from Paradise, Later Years, praised by poet Susan Elmslie (Museum of Kindness) as a collection of “piercing lyrics...of pathos and wit...a book you can read ‘as if time were long again’ and you are grateful for it.”
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