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, SEPTEMBER 19
stephanie roberts

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, for stephanie roberts.

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 stephanie roberts

friday, september 19
stephanie roberts

stephanie roberts as born in Panama, grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and has lived most of her life in the province of Quebec.

She is the author of rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Jurors said of the collection, “Roberts speaks with clarity and certainty, in a firm and haunting voice. This is an author clearly driven by a need to articulate what is missed.”

Her work has been widely featured and anthologized in POETRY, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Crannóg Magazine, Atlanta Review, The League of Canadian Poets, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. A 2021 Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient, her work also won first place in The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press). 

Poet Chris Hutchinson

friday, september 19
chris hutchinson

Chris Hutchinson is the author of five previous poetry books. He has lived all over North America—from Dawson City, Yukon, to Brooklyn, New York—working in brunch restaurants and, more recently, teaching creative writing. He is currently an English faculty member at MacEwan University, located  on Treaty 6 territory.

In Lost Signal, Chris Hutchinson celebrates the resilience and adaptability of language, while locating the tipping points of our ongoing environmental, informational, and humanitarian crises. Subtle semantic shifts mirror ideological rifts — yet lyricism thrives, along with a diversity of perspectives, forms, and styles, affirming faith in the power of the human spirit to challenge the insidious forces shaping our collective present.

Poet John Barton

friday, september 26
john barton

John Barton is a poet, essayist, editor, and writing mentor. His  collections of poetry include Hymn, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, Polari, Lost Family, which was nominated for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, Stopwatch, and Compulsory Figures. He lives in Victoria, BC. 

In Compulsory Figures, John Barton reflects on his childhood in Alberta, a close succession of family deaths, and coming of age as a gay man during the AIDS pandemic, and the struggle for equality rights. He broadens his inquiry to wrestle with settler colonialism, patriarchy, and the stigmatizing impact of internalized homophobia. Lyrical and thought-provoking, the poems in his thirteenth collection plunge into the depths of history, grief, and the unshakeable power of everyone and everything that shapes a life. 

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
therese svoboda

Terese Svoboda, a Guggenheim Fellow, has published 8 books of poetry, most recently Theatrix: Poetry Plays (Anhinga Press, 2021). Nova Scotian poet Virginia Konchan called it “is a tour de force collection that explodes our notion of the fourth wall.” Svoboda’s 24th book, and second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, appears in October.

Theatrix: Poetry Plays , written like a stage drama, is full of word play and humour, though not exactly Freytag’s five-part dramatic pyramid. Theatre tropes examine how we “act” in everyday relationships and “play” in an “all the world’s a stage” way, with references to Greek theatre and Shakespeare. The book also enters into a “theatre of the absurd” where comedy and tragedy are separated by a thin line, a place that can never be fully articulated outside of play, or the “tricks” in the feminized title.