Dead Poets Reading Series

We welcome you to an afternoon reflection and celebration, as poetic conversation and recitation travel through time.

Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance.

Venue & Accessibility:
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

Featured readers and poets include:
Louise Gluck was born in on April 22, 1943 in New York. She wrote 13 books of poetry including Meadowlands, The Wild Iris, Faithful and Virtuous Night and Winter Recipes for the Collective. She was also the author of two books of criticism and the late in life fable Marigold and Rose. One time U.S. Poet Laurate and the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, she died died on October 13, 2023.

Read by:
Jennifer Zilm has written a trinity of books: Waiting Room, The Missing Field and, most recently, First (Guernica, 2022). She is presently winterizing herself on 108th ave by the Expo Line in historic Downtown Surrey, thinking about centos and performing various synesthetic experiences.

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Walt Whitman, 1819-1892, along with Emily Dickinson, is considered one of North America’s most significant poets of the 19th century. Regarded as the father of free-verse poetry, Whitman’s sprawling poems celebrated humanity, the body and soul, democracy, nature, love and friendship, and would later influence countless poets, from William Carlos Williams, to Allen Ginsburg, to yours truly.

Read by:
Bradley Peters grew up in the Fraser Valley, BC, graduated from UBC’s Creative Writing Program, and has since won, been shortlisted, or named runner-up for numerous awards. His poems have appeared in Arc, Geist, Grain, SubTerrain, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. Bradley’s debut poetry collection, Sonnets from a Cell, was recently published with Brick Books. The poems in Bradley Peters debut collection mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang, and contemporary lyricism in a way that that takes account of the structures sentencing so many to lose.

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Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. Today, Olson remains a central figure of the Black Mountain Poetry school and is generally considered a key figure in moving American poetry from modernism to postmodernism. In these endeavors, Olson described himself not so much as a poet or a historian but as “an archeologist of morning.”

Read by:
Former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah lives in British Columbia. Recent books include Sentenced to Light, his collaborations with visual artists, Music at the Heart of Thinking, a series of improvisations, and is a door, a series of poems about hybridity. Available online are High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem (https://highmuckamuck.ca/), a collaboration with Rita Wong, beholden: a poem as long as the river (http://www.riverrelations.ca/new-page/) and an adaptation of his biofiction Diamond Grill (https://adoortobekicked.weebly.com/.

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Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian novelist, poet, educator, and nutritionist from Gaza. Her novel Oxygen is Not for the Dead won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. She held a BA in Biochemistry and an MA in Clinical Nutrition from the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University in Gaza respectively, both of which have been destroyed by Israeli strikes. She was killed in her home in south Gaza by an Israeli raid on Oct. 20th, 2023. She was 32 years old.

Read by:
Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her debut poetry collection echolalia echolalia comes out Fall 2024 with Brick Books. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.
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