Poet Daniela Elza

FRIDAY, october 3
Chapbook NIGHT -

DANIELA ELZA

Daniela Elza was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize with poems from her sixth book SCAR/CITY (MQUP, 2025). “Is This an Illness or an Accident?” (Caitlin Press, 2025) is her debut essay collection. Daniela is the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry. ALL OPEN MIC:

Title: SCAR/CITY - one word with a slash through it — pronounced as one word.
These poems walk streets and take snapshots of the impact financialization of our homes has on our sense of community and belonging. They meander through physical and philosophical materials - cement, memory, water, history, sand, light etc to document this urgent moment. The reader winds through fragments amidst urban fragmentation. 

SCAR/CITY asks why the housing crisis is so costly to our souls and wellbeing and interrogates a system that results in perceptible depravity, which leaves us homeless, metaphorically and literally.

Daniela Elza’s reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.

Poet Jeremy Loveday

Friday, october 3 -
jeremy loveday

Jeremy Loveday is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, and community builder based in Victoria, BC, on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən People. As co-founder and former longtime Artistic Director of the Victorious Voices youth poetry festival, Jeremy has helped hundreds of young poets find their first stage.

His work has appeared in publications such as CBC, National Observer, CV2, Funicular Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2023, and Claudia, a leading Brazilian magazine. Jeremy was the 2020 winner of the Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award. After more than two decades of performing poetry, Maybe the Starling is his first full-length collection.

Maybe the Starling, the debut full-length collection from award-winning poet and dynamic spoken word performer Jeremy Loveday, invites us to explore the intersections of crisis and care, grief and joy - a testament to poetry’s power to ignite change and nurture the human spirit. In a world marked by inequity and climate crisis, Maybe the Starling is a poetic response to uncertainty, confronting urgent questions while offering both salve and spark. Rooted in a deep love for the land and an abiding wonder for nature’s abundance, these poems illuminate the ways we belong to each other and the world around us.

Poet Brian Palmu

friday, october 10
brian palmu

Brian Palmu is a poet and critic currently living in Victoria, B.C. His two poetry chapbooks are Sunset Mathematics (Frog Hollow Press, 2017) and Parade (Anstruther Press, 2024).

The poems in Brian Palmu’s second chapbook, Parade, investigate work and mortality, often with metaphysical speculation between the personal and social. Voices and characters range from the fictional, composite, and autobiographical. Densely packed in lyrical free association, sonorities enlighten ambiguities in meaning.

Poet Karen Loucks

friday, october 10
karen loucks

Karen Loucks lives and writes in Victoria, B.C., the unceded traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies. She most recently won the High Marsh Press Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest (2024), and had a poem longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize (2023).

Truth, Hard as a Seed won the Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest with High Marsh Press in 2024. These poems turn our gaze toward the sharper edges of grief. They sidle up to tricky subjects, helping us to take a long look at losses both human and non-human in our own lives. Such losses can be hard to put a finger on or hard for others to see. Held up to the light, they are “germ and chaff, nothing left unthreshed.”

Poet Jacqueline Bell

friday, october 10
jacqueline bell

Jacqueline Bell’s poetry has been published in literary journals including The Fiddlehead, Grain, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Event.  Her work has also appeared in thirteen anthologies. Ubi Sunt, a chapbook, was published in 2024 by Alfred Gustav press.  Her collected work in Summoning won first place in the Raven Chapbooks contest, 2025.

In starlight and the blood moon, wind and wild strawberries, in the toss and brine of the sea, in driftwood angels and crows, grief floods these poems with beauty. Shadowed by the poet’s “list of losses,” this collection calls back the “honeyed days” of memory and sets them against the long and final goodbye whose music is a mingling of sorrow and wonder. Jacqueline Bell’s Summoning is a marvel of lyric grace.
— Carla Funk, author of Gloryland

Poet Susan Alexander

friday, october 10
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.

friday, october 17
victoria festival of authors event - Featuring Cecily nicholson, Christina shaw 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.

Curated by Planet Earth Poetry
Moderated by Kyeren Regehr

FRIDAY, october _____

_______________________

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, for poet _____________________

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 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. 

FRIDAY, october 31
halloween collaboration ~
with the victoria poetry project

Join us for a Halloween all open mic night of poetry.