Poet Kris Percy

friday, march 06
kris percy

Kristina Percy lives in the territory of the Ligwiłda’xw people (central Vancouver Island). Neither of her degrees have anything to do with creative writing. Her debut collection, Both True, was a runner-up in Button Poetry’s 2024 Chapbook Contest.

Both True is an offering to anyone who has ever felt angry & alone in their parenthood, anyone who has felt like they made a mistake becoming a parent but also known that they could not bear to have that part of themselves taken away. It is for everyone who has despaired in the world and wondered what other universes might exist, might be possible, might be better.

Poet Mary Ann Moore

friday march 06
mary ann moore

Mary Ann Moore (she/her) lives on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo. She is a poet, writer, and writing mentor.  Mary Ann’s full length book of poetry is Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press). The latest of her several chapbooks are Mending and Modern Words for Beauty, both from house of appleton. 

Modern Words for Beauty is a magical blend of wonder, poignancy, and whimsy. In her poems, Mary Ann captures the nuances of every day such as the road sign that inspired a poem: “Night Work on 10th Street. “The poems present well-rendered social observances” Steven Ross Smith said in a review. Among the poets who have inspired Mary Ann, and are honoured in her poems, are Michelle Poirier Brown, Robert Hass, Susan Musgrave, and Gwendolyn MacEwen.

Poet Tosh Sherkat

friday march 06
tosh sherkat

Tosh Sherkat lives in Victoria, BC / occupied lək̓ʷəŋən territory. They are a poet, organizer, and a Persian and Doukhobor settler-of-colour born in Nelson, BC/ occupied Sinixt territory. They received their MFA from UBC Okanagan, and their chapbook, Svoboda FSR: a biotext, was published by Pinhole Poetry in Fall 2025. 

Borrowing “biotext” from Fred Wah, the fragmented long poem contained in Svoboda FSR: a biotext make sense of a life simultaneously cleared way for by Canada’s machinery of assimilation and the losses of sameness and difference which remain etched in an identity not quite Canadian. In the poem, the body and landscape share form, carved into with a history brimming with livable, future worlds, maps for which lay in logging roads taking the reader to the site of contestation.

Poet Sam Cheuk

friday march 06
sam cheuk

Sam Cheuk is Sam is the author of Love Figures (Insomnia Press, 2011), Deus et Machina (Baseline Press, 2017), and Postscripts from a City Burning (Palimpsest Press,2021). This chapbook was tentatively titled Marginalia, as an epilogueto Postscripts, but he wanted cats on the cover, though he is allergicto them. Meh-ow..

Serving as the tail-end of the Hong Kong Series that began with Sam Cheuk’s second full-length collection Postscripts from a City Burning, which documented his time spent in Hong Kong witnessing  the protests and riots that began in 2019, Black Milk Tea meditates on his time there since returning to Canada, parsing what has been or needs to be forgotten from the indelible.

Poet A. Jamali Rad

friday march 13
A.Jamali Rad

A. Jamali Rad is a text-forward artist born in Iran and currently based in Windsor, ON, on the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa). They have published three full-length books of poetry through Talonbooks: for love and autonomy (2016), still (2021), and No Signal No Noise (2024). 

A Jamali Rad’s No Signal No Noise is a poetic hybrid, part philosophical treatise, epic poem, and experimental novel, beginning as the narrator finds a mysterious manuscript. Journeying through centuries and across continents, they’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero. It is the first installment in The Self-Inscribing Machine series, a speculative history of the binary.

Poet Shauntelle Dick-Charleson

friday march 13
Shauntelle dick-charleson

Shauntelle Dick-Charleson is the 2025-2026 Youth Poet Laureate of Victoria. A rising star in the spoken word community, Shauntelle is a poet from the Hesquiaht and Songhees First Nations whose work shines a light on Indigenous resilience, intergenerational trauma, and the experiences of Indigenous women. She began writing in Grade 10 and quickly found her voice on the stage. In 2019, she competed with the Vic Slam Team at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, where they placed 8th at nationals.

Her poetry has been featured in Aboriginal Voices 2, and she dreams of publishing her own book one day. 

Poet Kelly Shepherd

FRIDAY march 20
kelly shepherd

Kelly Shepherd is originally from Smithers, BC. He now lives and teaches in Edmonton, AB.  Dog and Moon is Kelly Shepherd’s third poetry collection. Insomnia Bird, his second, won the 2019 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Kelly has written eight chapbooks, and he’s a poetry editor for the environmental philosophy journal The Trumpeter.

Dog and Moon inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. Kelly Shepherd draws inspiration from the free-verse ghazal but takes the form and bends it, introducing couplets that recur and echo across his poems in a series of juxtapositions, “leaps,” and mycelial connections. These poems place nature writing in conversation with the language of poetry workshops, mythology and childhood memories, and sensorial encounters with the natural world colliding with images of home and belonging. 

Poet Irina Moga

FRIDAY march 20
irina moga

Irina Moga is the author of six poetry collections and a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada.​​ Her book, Variations sans palais (Éditions L’Harmattan, Paris) won the 2022 Dina Sahyouni International Literary Prize (France). Irina's poems, short stories and reviews have appeared widely in Canada, the United States, and France in publications such as Canadian Literature, carte blanche, Contemporary Verse 2, Hotch Potch Literature and Arts, New York Quarterly, California Quarterly, Split Rock Review, Lettres Capitales and Le Pan poétique des muses. Her work has been nominated for the SFPA Rhysling Award and Best of the Net.

Quantum (DarkWinter Press, 2025)  is a collection of poems meant to anchor readers in light-heartedness and serenity. In Quantum, the author moves us through layers of sensorial cues and a discourse whose ultimate goal is healing - an everyday catharsis for life’s tough moments, held in balance by the power of words.

Poet Amber Nuyens

friday march 20
Amber nuyens

Amber Nuyens grew up on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory (Winfield, BC) and lives on unceded Lək̓ ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territory (Victoria, BC) with her elderly lizard. She is currently a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria where she teaches fiction. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including carte blanche, PRISM international, Moss, and HAD. She is currently working on a Canada Council-funded collection of short fiction.

Amber Nuyens explores climate guilt, anxiety, and denial—both personal and collective in these vividly beautiful but stark and sobering works. Whether describing the soon-to-be extinct hoiho or a dying pet fish, Nuyens recounts these losses with the precision of a reporter—grim truths laid bare. These Dead Things Are Not My Fault is a necessary and phenomenal collection of prose poems and essayettes from an exciting new voice.

Poet Pasquale Verdicchio

friday march 27
pasquale Verdicchio

Pasquale Verdicchio, alumnus of UVic, is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His work has appeared through Guernica, Ekstasis, and Sun and Moon. His academic volumes include and Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature:The Denatured Wild (Lexington, 2016). Contentment, his most recent collection, appeared through Ekstasis.

“Contentment” represents a contemplation on variations of the term beyond its assumed senses of happiness and satisfaction through various contexts and the ambiguity of descriptive language. Its verses are meant as  signposts in the aid of achieving a direct and uncomplicated relationship with the world. Lines unwind to create spaces where attachment is undone through shifting tenses of being and territories. The resulting landscapes propose a non-conventional relationship, where to be at home in a place means to be able to leave it behind.

Poet Tharani Balachandran

friday march 27
tharani balachandran

Tharani Balachandran is a first-generation Canadian, lawyer, tea enthusiast, reader of books, lover of gossip and writer of poems who lives on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen peoples in Victoria, British Columbia.  Her work has appeared in the Racket Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Quail Bell and Fine Lines.  Her debut chapbook was entitled Love in the Time of Corona.

Brown Sugar Skin is the second poetry chapbook by Tharani Balachandran. In this collection, the author delves into childhood, family, immigration, mental health, dating, identity, fertility, and motherhood. She hopes that readers of this collection can find at least one poem that resonates, as moving from childhood to adulthood, becoming comfortable in your own skin, and loving yourself are all universal experiences.