Poet Isabella Wang

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7 -
isabella wang

Isabella Wang is the author of November, November, Pebble Swing - a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the chapbook On Forgetting a Language. Wang’s poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and five anthologies. She her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, Revise-Revision Street. 

Dedicated as letters and long epistolary lyrics to those who are missing a loved one, November, November acknowledges how sometimes a poem might be the only comfort that resides between silence and grief. Isabella Wang’s second collection began as a tribute to the late Phyllis Webb, and was completed in the aftermath of Wang’s cancer diagnosis. Entering the cloudless silver of November days, her words tell a story of loss and illness, and her poems linger in cold air, visible.

Poet Bradley Peters

FRIDAY, november 7
bradley peters

Bradley Peters is a poet, actor, and carpenter from Mission, BC. His poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines, has been shortlisted for The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Award, has twice been the runner-up for Subterrain‘s Lush Triumphant Award, and in 2019 placed first in Grain Magazine‘s Short Grain contest. Sonnets from a Cell is his first book.

Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace. Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.

Poet Brian Bartlett

Friday, november 14 -
brian bartlett

Brian Bartlett has published many poetry collections and three volumes of nature writing. His honours include the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry, two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes, and a short-listing for the 2025 Al and Eurithe Poetry Prize. He has lived in Halifax/Kjipuktuk since 1990.

In Brian Bartlett’s eighth collection of poems, The Astonishing Room, readers will find acute observations, dazzling register shifts, and mesmerizingly affectionate voices. The poet speaks as son, father and citizen, and addresses a dogwood tree, a flycatcher and a sixteenth-century pope. Acts of reading are vividly dramatized. Whether set by seashores or in forests, a lawyer’s office or an antique shop, Bartlett’s book surprises us with its capacity for facing hard truths, as well as for celebration and gratitude.

Poet Joanna Streetley

friday, november 14 -
joanna streetley

Joanna Streetley is the published author of five books, with work in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Best Canadian Essays 2017 and many magazines. She lives unceded Tla-o-qui-aht territory and was the inaugural Tofino Poet Laureate. Her 2025 poetry collection, All of Us Hidden, is published by Caitlin Press.

All of Us Hidden begins with poems that inhabit Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, the remote summer whaling islet where Streetly lived for several years with her former partner and stepsons. In the aftermath of the boys' later deaths by drowning, she returns to the island to document how both she and the island might have changed. Streetly’s poetry ripples out beyond location and loss, into a broader investigation of time’s capricious shaping and re-shaping of children, parents, Earth and the self.

Poet Susan Wismer

friday, november 21 -
susan wismer

Susan Wismer lives gratefully on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-gitchigami (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, with two human partners, a very large dog and various cohabiting plants, trees and critters. 

Her book Hag Dances came out in May 2025, with At Bay Press (Winnipeg). 
“These barefoot poems swing through a muscular crone hagiography, shape-shifting their ways through all the best dances. Wismer’s poetic sparseness makes visible a filigreed layer of resilience”.—Tanis MacDonald, author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking while Female. Susan Wismer has also published Hand Shadows, a chapbook of text and photos co-authored with dancers Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Press, 2024).

Poet Rahat Kurd

friday, november 21 -
rahat kurd

Rahat Kurd is a poet and writer based in Vancouver. The Book Of Z, (Talonbooks, 2025), is her second full-length work of poetry. Her previous titles with Talonbooks are The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters, (2021), co-authored with Kashmiri poet Sumayya Syed, and Cosmophilia, (poems, 2015). 

For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – “the wife of Aziz” in the Qur’an – has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry. At the same time, as the Biblical “wife of Potiphar” she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in Western traditions. In The Book of Z, Rahat Kurd vividly imagines Zulaykha reflecting on what consolations human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.

Poet Susan Alexander

friday, november 28 -
Susan alexander

Susan Alexander is the author of three collections of poems. Her work has won awards and been featured on buses as well as in anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people.

Susan Alexander’s Berberitzen is a story in poems about love discovered late in life—both its tenderness and its tenuousness. It’s about desire and the letting go of desire. Beginnings and endings are woven together in this beautifully designed chapbook. Partings are rehearsals and changing seasons are seasons of love. The ordinary takes on new meaning or no meaning as a familiar fir becomes a towering seraphim and daily irritations fall away. Heartbroken is heartful;  love and loss are inseparable.

Featured poets (l to r): Karen Solie, Cecily Nicholson, Christina Shah and event moderator Kyeren Regehr.

friday, october 17
victoria festival of authors event - Featuring Cecily nicholson, Christina shaH and karen solie
at langham court theatre *

* Please note: there will be no poetry event at Russell Books on 17 October

Poetry at the Threshold:
Witness, Resistance, and Renewal

In a world on fire—ecologically, politically, spiritually—what can poetry do? Three acclaimed poets—Karen Solie, Cecily Nicholson, and Christina Shah—join moderator Kyeren Regehr to explore the role of poetry in the face of crisis. Their recent books resist erasure, centring the lives of those that persist despite systems designed to overlook them. They grapple with the impossibility of belonging within extractive and exclusionary systems while refusing sentimentality or easy answers.

What does it mean to write what cannot—and should not—be made beautiful? How do poets bear witness while acknowledging their entanglement within systems of harm? Join us for a conversation that honours the fierce clarity and quiet persistence of poetry, with poets who do not look away.

This event is sponsored by Planet Earth Poetry and moderated by Kyeren Regehr, the City of Victoria’s Poet Laureate and the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry.

Poet Laura Apol

friday, october 24
laura apol

Laura Apol is the author of several prize-winning collections of poetry, including A Fine Yellow Dust and, most recently, Cauterized. Laura is a professor at Michigan State University and past poet laureate for the Lansing area; she conducts writing workshops locally, nationally, and internationally.

In this, her sixth full-length collection, Cauterized, award-winning poet Laura Apol returns to themes of loss that are, at least partly, cauterized: her struggles with a conservative religious upbringing, her mother’s illness and death, children growing up and leaving home, losing her adult daughter to suicide, a worldwide pandemic, the casualties of age. With startling honesty, empathy, and lyrical precision, Apol offers insight into the ways some wounds need cautery to begin to heal. 

Poet Susan McCaslin

friday, october 24
susan mcCaslin

Susan McCaslin has been writing poetry since she was twelve, when she discovered the power of language and love of nature. She has published nineteen volumes of poetry, six chapbooks, non-fiction, a memoir, and a volume of essays. Her recent volume, Named & Nameless (Inanna Publications) explores the relevance of ancient goddesses to our current times.

In this new collection of poetry, Susan McCaslin explores the meaning and significance of identity and all that can be found in a name, or lack thereof. Mixing the personal with the societal, McCaslin explores her own past and women’s continued role in child-rearing. This dreamlike series of encounters with nature and the divine invites deep reflection through re-discovering the familiar. Her joyful wordplay invites us to notice the tiniest details and contemplate the divine.

Poet Wendy Donawa

friday, october 24
wendy donawa

Wendy Donawa spent nearly 4 decades in Barbados, where she painted, taught, and became a museum curator.   Now retired in Victoria, she focuses on poetry, grateful for Patrick Lane’s, then Lorna Crozier's mentorship, and for the guidance of many gifted and generous poets. The Time of Falling Apart is her third collection.

The poems of The Time of Falling Apart search for grace and transcendence in the face of a world rife with injustice, colonial violence and war. But the world also gleams with the earth’s redemptive beauties and the hard-earned possibility of love. Sometimes starkly despairing, at times ironic, lyrical or sensuous, poems give voice to the body’s changes as mortality approaches and time shrinks in our wounded but resilient world.