FRIDAY, january 9
Special 30th Anniversary Event:
Planet Earth Poetry's Stewards, Artistic Directors
& Presidents Past & Present 

HOST: Rhonda Ganz is a longtime Planet Earth Poetry adherent whose Frequent, small loads of laundry (Mother Tongue) won the Relit Award for Poetry. She reads crime fiction, fondles paper in old books, and needlefelts fancy hearts in the Victoria home she shares with a quiet man and two not-so-quiet cats.

Wendy Morton is the author of six books of poetry and a memoir entitled Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, as well as being the first official Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series—Wendy and Yvonne Blomer received permission from P.K. Page to name the series after her famous glosa, “Planet Earth.” Wendy worked extensively with Indigenous students on the Elder Project, and was a founder of Random Acts of Poetry.

In 2019, The Capital Regional District designated the non-monetary position of Poet Laureate of Juan de Fuca to Wendy. Wendy is a recipient Order of B.C., 2010 Spirit Bear Award, an honorary citizen of Victoria, and the honourary ambassador for the Federation of B.C. Writers.

Yvonne Blomer is the author of Death of Persephone: A Murder, a poetic noir mystery rooted in myth and the ongoing violence against women and girls. An excerpt won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize in 2021. She has edited five anthologies, including the celebrated eco-poetry triptych Refugium, Sweet Water, and Sublime, as well as Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page, and served as Arc Magazine’s poet-in-residence for 2022–23.

With an MA from the University of East Anglia, she teaches immersive poetry workshops online. Yvonne was the artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry from 2009-2015.

Daniel G. Scott has published six volumes of poetry including Travels with Athóma (Aeolus House) & Aftertime (Ekstasis Editions).  He has several chapbooks, published individual poems in collections & has numerous academic publications. Writing has saved his life more than once. Daniel was the third artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry from 2015-2020.

Leanne Boschman has always loved the music and mystery of poetry. Besides publications in journals and anthologies, Leanne has two poetry collections: Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal (Leaf Press, 2009) and Here at the Crux (Silver Bow Publishing, 2022), as well as a chapbook Household Dangers (JackPine Press, Fall 2025). 

Zoe Dickinson has published two award-winning chapbooks: Public Transit (Leaf Press, 2015) and intertidal: poems from the littoral zone (Raven Chapbooks, 2022). Her work has also appeared in anthologies including Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (2022), and literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, and the 2024 Montreal Prize Anthology. Her first full length collection, Staff Picks for Invertebrates, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2026. Zoe was the artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry, first for a year with Leanne Boschman, and then ran the series herself until the end of 2023.

Kyeren Regehr’s Cult Life was a finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Prize and ReLit awards; Disassembling A Dancer won Raven Chapbooks inaugural contest. She’s a former poetry editor at The Malahat Review and hosts The Poet Laureate Podcast. Kyeren is co-editing After: Poems in Dialogue with Zoe Dickinson (forthcoming with Caitlin Press). She’s the current artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry (since 2024).

Michelle Poirier Brown is a Métis poet. Her poetry appears in numerous magazines and anthologies. Michelle’s debut book You Might Be Sorry You Read This (University of Alberta Press) and her chapbook Intimacies (JackPine Press) were both published in 2022. Michelle was the first president of Planet Earth Poetry when it officially became a society.

Anne Hopkinson was the second president of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series Society. She writes of her time in Algeria, Rwanda, and the Dominican Republic, and her love of nature and human nature. Her work appears in chapbooks, anthologies and journals, and has won the Victoria Writer’s Society Creative Non-fiction Contest, The Canadian Stories Poetry Prize and more.

Steven Ross Smith is a poet, sound poet, fiction writer, arts journalist and arts activist. He is best known for his fluttertongue poems, which have been published in six volumes. One of them, fluttertongue 3: disarray, won the 2005 Book of the Year Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards.

Steven served as writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, he was Executive Director of the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and was Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Center for the Arts from 2008 to 2014. He was appointed Banff Poet Laureate in 2018. He founded and performed with DUCT, in improvisatory sound and music ensemble and was also a member of the sound/performance ensemble Owen Sound. Steven is the current president of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series Society.

Poet Mahalia Smith

friday, january 16 -
mahalia smith

Mahalia Smith is a researcher, poet and editor based on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa. Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is available from Stelliform Press.

Told through the poems of one scientist, Seed Beetle explores the risks inherent in utopia and the idea that through science alone we can solve our environmental problems. In a climate changed future, southern Ontario has experienced widespread desertification and food insecurity. When Utopic Robotics presents a community with a swarm of automated beetles to revitalize the land and build utopia, community members rally behind the corporation and its message of hope. But technological solutions often come with secret risks.

Poet Lorne Daniel

friday, january 16 -
lorne daniel

Lorne Daniel has been deeply engaged in the literary community since the 1970s. His most recent book, What is Broken Binds Us (University of Calgary Press, 2025), has been a bestseller in Alberta and BC. He has published four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism.

What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: ancestral histories, enslaved families broken and dispersed, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma. What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. The British Columbia Review noted, “Daniel is a fine craftsman, both of poetry and the broken (and then healed) heart. His poems are alive on the page. They are gifts.”

Poet Jeremy Loveday

friday, january 23 -
jeremy loveday

Jeremy Loveday is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, and community builder based in Victoria, BC, on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən People. As co-founder and former longtime Artistic Director of the Victorious Voices youth poetry festival, Jeremy has helped hundreds of young poets find their first stage. His work has appeared in publications such as CBC, National Observer, CV2, Funicular Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2023, and Claudia, a leading Brazilian magazine. Jeremy was the 2020 winner of the Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award. After more than two decades of performing poetry, Maybe the Starling is his first full-length collection.

Maybe the Starling, the debut full-length collection from award-winning poet and dynamic spoken word performer Jeremy Loveday, invites us to explore the intersections of crisis and care, grief and joy - a testament to poetry’s power to ignite change and nurture the human spirit.

Poet Fenn Stewart

friday, january 23 -
fenn stewart

Fenn Stewart is the author of two poetry collections: Better Nature (2017) and women & roosters (2025). A former editor of The Capilano Review, she holds a PhD in social and political thought, and teaches literature and writing at Capilano University. Fenn lives with her kids on unceded Skwxwú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəỷəm, and səlilwətaɬ territories.

Taking its title from Galen’s claim that “all creatures are sad after sex except women and roosters,” this semi-autobiographical long poem winds its way through topics as far-reaching as climate change, trail-running, settler nationalism, love, loss, and illness. In women & roosters, cities, forests, and oceans are sites of abundance and abandonment. Humans, birds, deer, crabs, plants, and trees thrive and multiply, get sick and die, eat and are eaten, find joy and misery, run, fly, swim—and meet natural and unnatural ends.

Poet Joe Kidney

Friday, january 30 -
joe kidney

Joe Kidney, who is originally from BC, won a National Magazine Award and Arc’s Poem of the Year. His poems appear in Best Canadian Poetry and are forthcoming in The Iowa Review. His debut is Devotional Forensics (icehouse poetry 2025). He is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD.

Multi-award-winning poet Joseph Kidney catches all in his highly anticipated debut collection. Kidney’s rich imagery finds the durable in the contemporary and articulates a new vision of human vitality from inside a world that always seems on the verge of ending. This formally inventive collection exalts the ordinary and fleshes out the metaphysical, constructing theologies out of wildfires, classical music, and garbage collection, while engaging seamlessly with everything from renaissance literature to family intimacy, from modern art to biological science.

Poet Colin Morton

friday, january 30 -
colin morton

Colin Morton is an award winner for poetry, fiction and film. He grew up in Alberta, and lives on traditional Algonquin territory in Ottawa. His previous books include The Cabbage of Paradise: the Merzbook and Other Poems, Coastlines of the Archipelago, and The Hundred Cuts: Sitting Bull and the Major.

From a father’s war wounds to a lover’s surgical scars, the poems in Scar Atlas look critically and compassionately on the struggling world. Mercurial in form and tone, Morton’s poems challenge the reader to look closer and care more. In an age of compounding crises, Colin Morton articulates the need for personal connection and engagement. 

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saturday, january 31 -
special event: Planet earth poetry anniversary
party and fundraiser

Come join us for an evening of dancing, door prizes and celebration.