friday, november 07 -
PEP IN THE AFTERNOON!

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday, November 07 for poet Isabella Wang, 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. 

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 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. His poetry collection Sonnets from a Cell won the 2024 Raymond Souster Award for best poetry by a Canadian poet and was a 2024 Govenor General’s Literary Award finalist, among other accolades.

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 Purdy 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.

ON Friday, November 28, Planet Earth Poetry is presenting a special evening of readings by four British Columbia Poets Laureate (presented as a sister event with Twisted Poets Reading Series in Vancouver on January 21st, 2006)

Poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner

friday, november 28 -
elee kraljii gardiner

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of the poetry collections Trauma Head, serpentine loop, and Sometimes, Forest (forthcoming in 2026) as well as the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, sound and visual artists, Elee directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is the poet laureate of Vancouver.

Trauma Head, winner of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, investigates the experience of stroke, and serpentine loop, a finalist for the Souster Award, considers gender and physicality through the idea of ice. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, sound, and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational art installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Newer poems are rooted in eco-poetics and reflect her developing theory of hylofeminism, a feminism of the forest.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s reading is sponsored by The Writers’ Union of Canada.

Poet Neil Surkan

friday, november 28 -
neil surkan

Neil Surkan is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Unbecoming and On High, and the chapbooks Die Workbook, Ruin, Their Queer Tenderness, and Super, Natural. A new collection, Empties, is forthcoming in 2026. He is the current Poet Laureate of Nanaimo, BC (2024-26). Website: neilsurkan.com

Unbecoming clings to hope while the world deteriorates and grows less hospitable from moment to moment. Interplaying tenderness with dogged perseverance, these poems tumble through vignettes of degraded landscapes, ebbing spiritual communities, faltering men, and precarious friendships. In the face of such despair, responsibility and optimism bolster one another - exuberance, amazement, and compassion persist despite the worsening of the wounded Earth.  The poems in Unbecoming face the horizon with wary eyes and refuse to turn away.

Poet Kyeren Regehr

friday, november 28 -
kyeren regehr

Kyeren Regehr is the author of Cult Life (finalist for ReLit Awards and The Victoria Butler Book Prize) and Disassembling A Dancer (winner of Raven Chapbooks), as well as two earlier chapbooks. Her poetry has been published in Canada, Australia, and the USA, and thrice-longlisted for the CBC Poetry Awards. She’s the artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry reading series, and is co-editing After: Poems in Dialogue with Zoe Dickinson, forthcoming with Caitlin Press. Kyeren is the 7th Poet Laureate of Victoria and hosts The Poet Laureate Podcast. Website: kyerenregehr.ca

Poet Janet Kvammen

friday, november 28 -
janet Kvammen

Janet Kvammen is a poet and mixed media artist with a passion for the abstract. President of the Royal City Literary Arts Society, she is the recipient of the 2023 Bernie Legge Artist of the Year award. Janet is the current Poet Laureate for the City of New Westminster, BC.

Poet Marilyn Bowering

Friday, December 05 -
marilyn bowering

Marilyn Bowering’s poetry  has twice been short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award and received  many prizes named after women. Last year’s More Richly in Earth (MQUP), part memoir and part literary investigation, was a finalist for the Saltire and the Hubert Evans Prizes. She lives in Victoria BC. 

In Frayed Linens, Marilyn Bowering writes of the beauty and resilience within the darkness of the human journey. She is accompanied by ancestral and mythic figures, beloved poets, and the ghosts of her own life-story as the body and spirit — the frayed linens of the title—are worn and renewed over time. These are poems of witness, empathy and compassion, clear-eyed in their confrontation of failure and in the capacity of friendship, love and will, to retain redemptive power.  

Poet Michael V. Smith

friday, december 05 -
michael V. Smith

Michael V. Smith is a writer, performer, and filmmaker. Smith is the winner of numerous awards, including the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize and the Director’s Prize at Cinema Diverse in Palm Springs. He is currently a UBCO Researcher of the Year. He lives in Kelowna, BC. 

Michael V. Smith’s poetic memoir Soundtrack is about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired poems capture the last three decades of the millennium and reveal how music has an uncanny ability to remind us not just where we were at a given moment in time but who we were.