The Planet Earth Poetry reading series is a launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not. It is a place where words are most important. A venue in which all manner of poets and writers are welcome; a place for excellence, innovation, collaboration, diverse projects and experiments. The evening begins at 7:30 with an open mic, followed by a featured reader(s). Planet Earth Poetry is located at Hillside Coffee and Tea, 1633 Hillside Ave (across from Bolen Books). Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7pm.

Friday, march 6, 2015

Claire Caldwell & Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Claire Caldwell is a poet and editor living in Toronto. She was the 2013 winner of the Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize, and her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Maisonneuve and Prism International. Claire holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and a BA in English and French literature from McGill. She also runs poetry workshops for kids, including SmallPrint Toronto's Rhyme Stew Crew, which brings together classic children's poetry and hip hop. Currently, Claire edits clean romances and action-adventure novels at Harlequin–a combination that, among other things, has led to some strange internet search histories.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn grew up in Western Canada and now lives and teaches in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lorri is the author and editor of thirteen collections of (academic and trade) nonfiction and poetry, including Threading Light (2011) and Lost Gospels (2010). Untying the Apron: Daughters Remember Mothers of the 1950s (Guernica, 2013) is now in its third printing.

Poet Laureate of Halifax for 2005-2009, Lorri has won several national and international awards for creative nonfiction (lyric essay), poetry, magazine writing, as well her University’s award for innovative teaching (2014) and a Halifax Woman of Excellence award for her work in the arts (2009). Lorri has served as a mentor, editor, reader, jury member, and writer in residence across Canada and in Australia, and has led writing workshops in the Arctic, Western Canada, Australia, Ireland, Chile, and Greece.

Friday, march 13, 2015

Alice Major
& Beth Kope

For Alice Major, science and poetry are two ways of trying to understand the world that overlap with one another. She'll be reading from her award-winning essay collection, "Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science" and from her 10th poetry collection Standard Candles, which is due out from the University of Alberta Press in September. She is delighted to be back at Planet Earth Poetry – especially at seeing green after winter in her home city of Edmonton, where she served as the first Poet Laureate.

The poems in Average Height of Flight are grounded in the landscape of coastal BC, where the struggles and losses within the narrator’s life serve as a counterpoint to her walks in the natural world.

Ambling along watersheds, tromping through salal or climbing hills, Beth Kope and her “tribe” of dogs keeps bolting, scrabbling or careening off trail. At times quietly meditative and other times wildly thrashing, the poet journeys deeper and deeper into both the self and the moss-deep forest. Kope doesn’t simply observe the landscape, she enters it – the cascade falls and trembling green avenues, the folding dusk and pine tree’s arms. She finds comfort whatever the season, absorbs beauty wherever she finds it. Even a heron carcass laid out on the beach is seen through the poet’s eyes as balletic, in flight.

Planet Earth Poetry @ words on Ice
at WordsThaw

Friday, march 20, 2015
7:30 p.m. (doors at 7:00 p.m.)

Human and Social Development Building, Room A240, UVic

Words on the rocks after party!

at Hillside Tea & Coffee
1633 Hillside, PEP’s usual venue.

WordsThaw Pass or tix at door $10/$5

Karen Enns, matt rader & Peter Midgley

Karen Enns published her first book of poetry after working as a classical musician for almost twenty years. That Other Beauty was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection, Ordinary Hours, was published by Brick Books in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain Magazine, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review.

Matt Rader is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno (House of Anansi 2011), as well a collection of stories called What I Want to Tell Goes Like This (Nightwood 2014). He is core faculty in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.

Peter Midgley is the author of a travel memoir, Counting Teeth: A Namibian Story, as well as of plays, poetry, and children’s books. His award-winning work has been translated into 28 languages. He is the president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. A collection of poetry, Unquiet Bones, will be published by Wolsak & Wynn in fall 2015. He lives in Edmonton.

Friday, march 27, 2015

Billeh Nickerson
& Amber Dawn

Billeh Nickerson’s five books include The Asthmatic Glassblower; McPoems; Impact: the Titanic Poems; and Artificial Cherry, which was nominated for the 2014 City of Vancouver Book Award. He is a silver medalist at the Canadian Gay Curling Championships, and Chair of the Creative Writing department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Amber Dawn is a writer from Vancouver. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir won the 2013 Vancouver Book Award. She is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa, and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire and With A Rough Tongue.