About this event

What: Nine poets reading from recent work
When: September 16 from 7:00 PM onwards
Where: in the back garden at Historic Joy Kogawa House
Cost: $10 (no one turned away)

A limited number of tickets are available now for Poetry Night at Historic Joy Kogawa House, September 16 from 7:00 PM onwards. Nine poets will read for ten minutes, so we’re going to try to keep the evening moving along briskly, with five readers before and four readers after a refreshment break.

In honour of COVID, we will host outdoors in the back garden at Historic Joy Kogawa House, limit the number of people in the audience, and carefully follow all pandemic protocols. Proof of vaccination will be required to attend this event and please wear a mask.

There will also be a small cover charge of $10, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Hosted by Kevin Spenst. This will be the second poetry night that Danny Peart has organized for us.

About the Poets

Em Dial

Em Dial

Em Dial is a queer, triracial, chronically ill poet and educator born and raised in the Bay Area of California. A 2022 Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 PEN Canada New Voices Award and the 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award, their work also appears in or is forthcoming from Literary Review of Canada, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. Em Dial is writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House in September 2021, in collaboration with PEN Canada.

Tolu Oloruntoba

Tolu Oloruntoba

Tolu Oloruntoba is the author of The Junta of Happenstance, and the chapbook Manubrium, shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. He is a project manager, lapsed physician, and serial migrant.

His poetry has appeared in several publications locally and internationally, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Cassandra Myers

Cassandra Myers

Cassandra Myers is a queer, trans, crip, mad, South Asian-Italian poet, performer, educator, and social worker from Toronto. A Masters of Social Work candidate at York University, Cassandra is also a crisis intervention counsellor and youth worker, specializing in care for sexual violence survivors and the BIPOC LGBTQ2SIA+ community. A Pink Door Fellow, their work can be found in Overheard, The Shortline Review, UncommonYOU, and elsewhere.

Holly Flauto Salmon

Holly Flauto Salmon

Holly Flauto Salmon’s fiction and creative non-fiction has been published in The Puritan, Joyland, and The Rusty Toque. She recently completed a manuscript of memoir-based poetry exploring immigration to Canada as a modern-day settler. She works at Douglas College and lives on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.

Danny Peart

Danny Peart

Danny Peart is best known for his work as a roadie for Rob Taylor’s band. His own books are titled Ruined By Love, Stark Naked in a Laundromat, Another Mountain to Climb and the forthcoming Not Quite So Handsome (2022).

Tawahum Justin Peter Bige

Tawahum Justin Peter Bige

Tawahum Justin Peter Bige is a Lutselk’e Dene and Plains Cree spoken word artist from unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh Territory (Vancouver). With a BA in Creative Writing from KPU, Tawahum has performed at countless festivals with poems featured in numerous publications. Their land protection work versus Trans Mountain pipeline expansion had them face incarceration in 2020. Tawahum’s debut collection of poetry is set for Spring 2022, published by Nightwood Editions. 

Kevin Spenst

Kevin Spenst

Kevin Spenst, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of Hearts Amok, Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press), and over a dozen. His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including Prairie Fire, CV2, BafterC, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2014.

Helen Gowans

Helen Gowans

Helen Gowans won the Pandora’s Collective 2020 poetry prize for her poem “Mackenzie Stone” and was shortlisted for the Magpie Award for Poetry 2020 for “Crete.”

Her first chapbook, There and Here, is available at Upstart and Crow or from her website HelenGowans.com. She expects to release a second one on January 22, 2022.

Isabella Wang

Isabella Wang

Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019), and the full-length debut Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, forthcoming October 2021). Her poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and three anthologies. She is pursuing a double-major in English and World Literature at Simon Fraser University, and is an editor at Room magazine.