friday, april 04 -event sponsored by the league of canadian poets for national poetry month

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday, April 04 for award-winning poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn, the author and contributing editor of fifteen titles of poetry, creative nonfiction and scholarly work.

Doors at 1:30pm, with sign-up for open mic.

New Horizons Centre is at 234 Menzies St. in James Bay (street parking only). Please note that unlike our evening readings, the afternoon readings will not be livestreamed or recorded.

Poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn

FRIDAY, april 04
lorri neilsen glenn

Lorri Neilsen Glenn is the author and contributing editor of fifteen titles of poetry, creative nonfiction and scholarly work, including her latest work, The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been (Nimbus). Halifax’s first Métis Poet Laureate, she was raised on the prairies and lives in Nova Scotia. 

A hybrid memoir in many voices, The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been, is a poetic rendering of a woman’s long life, a stock-taking of what matters with an eye to what’s next. Described as “a gift of storytelling magic,” the collection explores ageing, interconnectedness (the Cree concept of wahkohtowin), connection to the land, the role of women in society and the writing life through pivotal moments and significant characters in the author’s life. 

Poetic Appetizer
Excerpt from “Blur”, published in Juniper Poetry (Volume 8, Issue 2) 

My feet slip into the old green waders, damp
and too large, and I lumber down to the sea
in the dim light because I ache for the sound
of it, the shushing and trembling waves
that hiss at the toes of my boots, a kind
of summoning. Ghosts sidle up, press against
me in the chill, millennia of howls and cries
and silent boats dark as stones drifting like
 
sighs toward the bottom, stories clinging to
their hulls. An open coffin. I’m never the only
company I keep, and the blacker the water, the
greater the weight of knowing this.
 

Poet Terry Ann Carter (photo credit: Rhonda Ganz)

FRIDAY, april 04
terry ann carter

Terry Ann Carter is the author of eight collections of long form poetry, five haiku chapbooks, two haiku guide books, and a History of Haiku in Canada (Ekstasis Editions, 2020). As past president of Haiku Canada, she has given haiku and book arts workshops around the world.

In the Spaces Between Bonsai is about the manifold joys and challenges of reading, writing, and sharing haiku. Vivid, emphathetic encounters in the author's wide-ranging travels, together with her extensive knowledge of cultural history, enrich a collection that is both celebratory and searchingly insightful. Even readers who have a limited acquaintance with "the way of haiku" will find these explorations illuminating.

Poetic Appetizer

From “Lines Written on a Terrace”

..All I need now
is to write about a moonflower, washed
in its moon whiteness, its porcelain
light. Cities, long summer, the rescue
of waterfalls do not compare
to the peacefulness of such a haiku.

FRIDAY, april 11
National poetry month event presented in collaboration with the malahat review

Featured poets:

Neil Surkan is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Unbecoming and On High, and the chapbooks Die Workbook, Ruin, Their Queer Tenderness, and Super, Natural. A new collection, Empties, is forthcoming in 2026. He is the current Poet Laureate of Nanaimo, BC (2024-26).

Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living in Vancouver, B.C. and the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022), and a full-length collection, Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

Catherine St. Denis is the winner of The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Fiction. She placed in Grain’s Hybrid Forms contest, was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was twice shortlisted for PEN Canada's New Voices Award. Her work is featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

Eli Mushumanski is a writer who grew up on the unceded territories of the Sai’kuz people in Northern BC. They were the tenth Youth Poet Laureate for the City of Victoria in 2022. They have work published in The Malahat Review, Plenitude Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and elsewhere.

Poet Junie Désil

FRIDAY, APRIL 25
JUNIE DESIL -
(event sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets)

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. Her second collection, allostatic load, is forthcoming in Spring 2025.

Allostatic Load, her latest work, is an evocative poetry collection chronicling the lived experiences of a Black woman amidst a tumultuous year marked by global racial tensions. Interweaving personal narratives with collective struggles, the poems delve into themes of identity, ancestral trauma, and the relentless pursuit of social justice.

Poetic Appetizer
wake up to this heart
hammering
for the attending it’s been asking for
care
blood is under pressure -
to block

up the valves to your life’s chamber

Poet Melanie Siebert

FRIDAY, APRIL 25
melanie siebert

Melanie Siebert is the author of two poetry collections: Signal Infinities and Deepwater Vee, which was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. Her nonfiction book Heads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing for young readers in Canada.

Her most recent poetry collection, Signal Infinities, explores the intelligences and limits of the body, as a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake. As pain arrives. As glaciers and ancient forests disappear. With unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes and chemical shifts.

Poetic Appetizer

Excerpt from “More than the odd existential crisis in the mirror”

A lake can’t shake its sky awareness.
It flaunts an acquired ability to take it.

Tremendously electric, 
not just a lot of whiskers,

lake aspires to build a reputation as a serious 
documentarian contacting a present moment.