NOVEMBER 21, 2025
7:00Pm (doors at 6:30PM)
Louise Halfe - Sky Dancer & Gregory Scofield
followed by a conversation with
TIM LILBURN
Saturday November 21st at 7:00pm (doors at 6:30pm)
OPEN SPACE ARTS SOCIETY: 510 Fort St, 2nd floor (wheel-chair accessible lift)
Readings by Louise Bernice Halfe - Sky Dancer & Gregory Scofield, followed by a conversation with Tim Lilburn.
Three of Canada’s finest poets together for a rare event!
Tea will be offered after the reading.
This event is supported by the generous support of the Department of Writing at UVic, Open Space Arts Society, The League of Canadian Poets, and Planet Earth Poetry.
POET, LOUISE BERNICE HALFE - SKY DANCER
Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer is an acclaimed nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) poet and writer from the Saddle Lake First Nation in Alberta. She has been the recipient of multiple awards and appointments for her work, including the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal, Saskatchewan Provincial Poet Laureate, Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, King Charles III Coronation Medal, and Member of the Order of Canada.
In never-before-collected essays and new poems, poet and kêhtê-aya (Elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land. wîhtamawik / Tell Them is a stunning love song to nêhiyaw ways of knowing—ways which Halfe has spent her life working to reclaim from the violence of colonization, in order to celebrate their survival and share their enduring teachings with future generations.
Louise Bernice Halfe’s reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.
POET, GREGORY SCOFIELD
Gregory Scofield is of Red River Métis ancestry whose family roots can be traced to the historic Métis community of Kinosota-Reedy Creek, Manitoba. He has taught Creative Writing and First Nations and Métis Literature at Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, the Alberta University of the Arts and was most recently an associate professor in the Department of English at Laurentian University. Further to writing and teaching, Scofield is also a skilled bead-worker, and he creates in the medium of traditional Métis arts. He continues to assemble a collection of mid to late 19th century Cree-Métis artifacts, which are used as learning and teaching pieces.
Gregory won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel, and has since published seven further volumes of poetry including Witness, I am. He is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012) and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize (2016) that is awarded to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work. His most recent publication is the award-winning kôhkominawak ocihcîwâwa – Our Grandmothers’ Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art (Gabriel Dumont Institute Press).
POET, TIM LILBURN
Tim Lilburn lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Harmonia Mundi, The House of Charlemagne, Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, and To the River. His work has received the Governor General’s Award, The Canadian Authors’ Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Prize) and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. His poetry has been translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three essay collections, Living in the World as if It Were Home, Going Home and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and editor of two other influential books on poetics. A new essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, will appear from the University of Alberta Press in November, 2023. He has taught at the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan and Middlebury College and worked with the dance troupe New Dance Horizons as a writer and performer.