Poet bronwyn preece

friday may 1
bronwyn preece

bronwyn preece, dubbed the ‘backcountry poet’, holds a PhD in performance. she is the author of knee deep in high water : riding the Muskwa-Kechika, expedition poems (Caitlin Press, 2023); and with Simply Read Books Sea to Sky Alphabet (2023); Gulf Islands Alphabet (2012) and the forthcoming Canadian Rockies Alphabet (2026).

Written wearing muddy boots, in wet tents and with frozen fingers, bronwyn preece’s hiking beyond is a collection steeped in the messiness of being alive. With reverence for geology, ornithology, botany, history and all that resists easy categorization, preece captures the soundbites, questions and quiet revelations of solo, backcountry travel. From recovery from injury to the realities of living with a genetic disorder, hiking beyond explores what it means to hike and to belong.

Sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets

Poet Renee Sarojini Saklikar

friday may 1
renee sarojini saklikar

Renee Sarojini Saklikar is the author of six books, including the award-winning Children of Air India and Listening to the Bees. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Exile Editions, Chatelaine, The Capilano Review and Pulp Literature. She was Poet Laureate for the city of Surrey (2015-2018), co-founded Lunch Poems at Simon Fraser University, and teaches creative writing at Douglas College. Bramah’s Discovery is the third volume of her epic fantasy in verse series, THOT J BAP (The heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns). She lives in East Vancouver.

Sponsored by The Victoria Arts Council

Poet Joanna Lilley

friday may 8
joanna lilley

Joanna Lilley’s fourth poetry collection, Three Pieces of Sea, is being published by Turnstone Press in spring 2026. Her previous collection, Endlings, won the Fred Kerner Book Award and her novel, Worry Stones, was longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award. From the UK, Joanna has settled gratefully in Whitehorse, Yukon.

In a progression from life to loss, author Joanna Lilley explores the relationships between visual art, grief, sisterhood and the process of healing in her fourth poetry collection Three Pieces of Sea, published by Turnstone Press. A poetic portrait of the late artist Rebecca Lilley this ekphrastic, elegiac collection reflects a life lived and remembered through art. It is Lilley’s most personal work to date.

Sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets

Poet Ronna Bloom

friday may 8
ronna bloom

Ronna Bloom is is the author of eight books of poetry. Her poems have been broadcast on CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and translated into Bangla and Chinese. She has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers, health care professionals and architects. Her most recent book is In a Riptide (Brick Books), 2025.

The characters in Ronna Bloom’s new collection In a Riptide are tired, sick, old, fragile, baffled, worried, dying, dead, uncertain, snacking, happy, generous, preoccupied, horny, astonished, and sometimes free. Emily Dickinson and Bukowski show up in the same poem. The Buddha has a shower. And Sisyphus is released from his burdens. It’s the hospital meets the circus. Here, humour, darkness, and ecstasy mingle, and the chaos doesn’t stop. But there’s breath in these poems. There’s life.

Poet Tom Wayman

friday may 8
tom wayman

Tom Wayman was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark by the Vancouver Public Library in 2015, and in 2022 he received the province’s George Woodcock Award for literary lifetime achievement. His newest poetry collections are How Can You Live Here? (Frontenac House, 2024) and Out of the Ordinary (Harbour, 2025).

We live in extraordinary times so far this century—wars overseas, climate change, the unparalleled gap between the very rich and the rest of us, etc. But day-to-day, our lives inhabit the ordinary. The poems of Out of the Ordinary go deep into ordinary life to see the roots or wellhead of the extraordinary, finding family history inside a fir needle, a sense of personal limitations within a raindrop suspended from a twig, the working life in a nail.

Sponsored by The Victoria Arts Council

Poet Laurie D. Graham

FRIDAY may 15
laurie d. Graham

Laurie D. Graham grew up east of amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), and she now lives in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario). Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second and third books, Settler Education and Fast Commute, were both nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. 

In Calling It Back to Me, Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection reflects a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous reckoning with the legacy of leaving home.

Sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets

Poet Stephanie Bolster

friday may 15
stephanie bolster

Stephanie Bolster recently published her fifth book and has won the Governor General’s, the Gerald Lampert, and the Bronwen Wallace Award, among others.  She grew up in Burnaby and teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. She is Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry 2008 and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems,

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our lives. 

Sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets

Poet Misha Solomon

Friday May 22
misha solomon

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is his debut full-length collection.

My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is a daring, erotic, and humorous exploration of queer longing and Jewish possibility at the turn of two centuries. In a captivating series of narrative poems, Misha Solomon entwines an alternate memoir of his great-grandfather in pre-Holocaust Romania with a contemporary gay life in Montreal. With profound vision, voice, and craft, Solomon sets a new and powerful precedent for speculative poetic histories.

friday may 22
ZOE DICKINSON

Zoe Dickinson has published two award-winning chapbooks: Public Transit and intertidal: poems from the littoral zone. Her poetry is rooted in BC’s Pacific coastline, where she is manager at Russell Books and AD emerita of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. Staff Picks for Invertebrates is her first full-length collection.

Welcome to Russell Books: an indie bookstore on an island in the Pacific Ocean, where anemones dispense life advice and staff recommend books to mollusks. Staff Picks for Invertebrates is a semi-autobiographical love letter to books, readers, and the lands they inhabit. Russell Books staff and customers, swallows and starfish, the store itself and the books inside: all dwell in the same fragile, radiant world.

FRIDAY MAY 29

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday 29 May for poet Scott Jackshaw.

Scott Jackshaw is a poet, scholar, and editor based in Providence, Rhode Island. Their debut poetry collection is Stigmata (Talonbooks, 2025). They hold a PhD in English from Brown University and work as managing editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

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 Scott Jackshaw

friday may 29
scott jackshaw

Scott Jackshaw is a poet, scholar, and editor based in Providence, Rhode Island. Their debut poetry collection is Stigmata (Talonbooks, 2025). They hold a PhD in English from Brown University and work as managing editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

The poems in Stigmata are ruinous encounters between traumatic and historical memory. They transfigure the cult of the wound into a mystic frenzy of sex and grief. Drawing inspiration from a broad archive of texts and practices—apophatic theology, body horror, gardening, poststructuralism, and bad sex—Stigmata forms a counterhistory of the wound, an experiment in fractured memoir and misplaced anatomy that weaponizes the confessional mode, wrenching it from self-narration to approach a violence that breaks language and bodies apart.

Sponsored by The Victoria Arts Council

Poet Kath Healing

friday may 29
kath healing

Kath Healing Kath Healing (they/them) is a queer, trans, and disabled poet based in Victoria, British Columbia. They won the 2025 Victoria Writers’ Society Poetry Contest. Their work appears in The Malahat Review, PRISM international, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Contemporary Verse 2, Plenitude, Pulp Literature, and Augur.

Kath Healing writes across page and stage. Their work explores what survives the paperwork — the medical, the institutional, and the personal. Their poems trace the tension between documentation and lived experience, where language attempts to contain what the body refuses to resolve.

friday june 05
Jónína KirtoN

Jónína Kirton is a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet.   She graduated from the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio in 2007, where she is now an instructor.  Although she acknowledges and is thankful for the teachings offered through academic institutions, she leans heavily into what some term ‘other ways of knowing’.  Her writing is often a weaving of body and land as she firmly believes until we care for women’s bodies we will not care for the earth.

A late blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category.  Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.  Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on a Metis family. A landless Metis citizen, she currently lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, the unceded territory of many Coast Salish nations, including the Qayqayt, Sto:lo, Tsawwassen,  Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie and Kwantlen.

Sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets

Poet Susan Musgrave

friday 05 june
susan musgrave

Susan Musgrave has published more than 30 books and received awards in six categories — poetry, novels, non-fiction, food writing, editing and books for children. She lives on Haida Gwaii where she owns and manages Copper Beech House. Her most recent book is Exculpatory Lilies, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, 2023. 

From Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Susan Musgrave, author of more than thirty-five books, comes Hunger, works selected from Musgrave's last four books with an introduction by Micheline Maylor (The Bad Wife, Little Wildheart) and a humorous and thoughtful after-essay by Musgrave herself about the breadth of her literary career. This volume features poems written since the death of Musgrave's husband, the award-winning memoirist Stephen Reid, and showcases Musgrave's signature blend of ribaldry, wit, and the big questions about life, love, rebellion, and aging. A visceral and hearty collection of poems, and an examination of the feminine principle in the first two decades of the 21st century, this selected volume is a tribute to Musgrave's long career and literary wisdom. 

Sponsored by The Victoria Arts Council