This season we invite our audiences (both live and livestreamed) to engage in the historic poetic tradition of writing “after” poems (poetry in response to the work of another poet), specifically, the new work of our Friday night Featured Poets.

In 2025 we’ll begin the call for submissions* to our literary anthology of poetry:

After: Poems in Dialogue
An Anthology of Poetic Responses

*Please do not send submissions or email us about the anthology yet—but do sign up for the Planet Earth Poetry weekly newsletter if you’d like to be among the first to receive updates!

SUBMISSION SCHEDULE

We’ve created two submission periods:

1. January 1st 2025 - April 30th 2025: poems written in response to poets featured between September and December 2024

2. June 1st 2025 - September 31st 2025: poems written in response to poets featured between January and June 2025

When submissions open, you may send up to six poems within each submission period, but they MUST be contained within a single file (PDF or Word Doc only).

You’ll find more submission details here towards the end of 2024.

Planet Earth Poetry is committed to equity in the arts and actively seeks to create space for all voices, from our featured poets to our open mic readers.

When booking our featured poets our aim is to offer first preference to poets who identify with communities under-served by the Canadian literary establishment. We see it as vital to book at least 50% of our featured readers, master class poet-mentors, and summer retreat facilitators from traditionally underrepresented communities, including Indigenous poets, BIPOC poets, 2SLGBTQ+ poets, poets with disabilities, etc.

When selecting poetry for the anthology, our aim is to represent as many poets from Season 29 as possible, and to offer space to poets in the anthology as equitably as possible—all while adhering to the highest of literary standards.

We encourage all poets to send their work!
Whoever you are, you are welcome here.

MINI RESPONSE POEM WORKSHOPS

Join us for a series of FREE generative workshops tailored to writing response poems!

Each workshop will be a bite-sized 45 mins long and focus on a different approach to response poems.

We’ll look at examples, offer mini writing exercises to get you started, and even show you how to format attributions!

All workshops will be held at Russell Books Victoria right before our Friday evening events.
Please arrive ON TIME—we will begin immediately.

Donations of $5-10 to Planet Earth Poetry are welcome, but we are happy just to have you join in the workshop!

(Sign up for the open mic will begin AFTER the workshop is finished.)

PRIORITY OPEN MIC SPOTS
for our POEM-A-MONTH CHALLENGE!

If you have a RESPONSE POEM written after the work of a Featured Poet*, we will give you a PRIORITY OPEN MIC SPOT—even if you read last week.

We’ve created this community challenge to immediately begin the conversation between the poetry of our audience and our featured poets (and of course to help you generate poems to send to our anthology!)

You can join the challenge in person at our weekly Friday night open mic at Russell Books (downtown Victoria).

You might also like to read at our monthly open mic at New Horizons in James Bay (scroll down for more details about our open mics!)

If you are living out of town, or even in another province, you’re welcome to send your poem HERE and we’ll ask a local poet to read it at our open mic.

With gratitude to our Planet Earth Poetry intern, Anna Cavouras, for this fabulous idea!

*Featured Poet must be from Season 29!

MASTER CLASSES

Planet Earth Poetry offers two Master Classes (formerly known as workshops) each season.

This season we’ve booked two exceptional poets to offer a three-hour Master Class—one in the fall and one during the spring.

We are hopeful that these classes will support the writing of “after” poems, but either way, these generative classes will offer the community concentrated time to write.

In order to remove barriers, we offer two fully funded Indigenous bursaries, and four sliding scale seats (two priced at a mid-range, and two lower-priced seats).

This year tickets to our Master Classes will be sold through EVENTBRITE (but if need by, you’ll still be able to email Nancy for tickets).

FRIDAY NIGHT COMMUNITY OPEN MIC
(the longest running poetry open mic in Victoria—consistently making space for local poetry since 1995!)

We invite the community to read their “after” poems at our weekly open mic. When we read our work to a live audience we get immediate feedback via the audience, and as a result we can hone our work—we often hear it more clearly with an audience than when reading work aloud to ourselves.

Sign up for the open mic begins at around 7:00pm every Friday (unless otherwise specified on the homepage of this website or on our social media).
RUSSELL BOOKS: 747 Fort St #100, Victoria, BC V8W 3E9

MONTHLY AFTERNOON COMMUNITY OPEN MIC
We also host a monthly open mic at New Horizons in James Bay: sign up begins at 1:30pm (and it’s usually easier to get on the list for this one!) Please see our homepage for dates.
NEW HORIZONS: 234 Menzies Street, Victoria BC

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our open mic etiquette HERE

Zoe Dickinson

Zoe Dickinson’s poetry is rooted in British Columbia’s Pacific coastline, with a focus on local ecology and human relationships with nature. She is a manager at Russell Books, one of Canada’s largest used, antiquarian, and new bookstores. Between 2020-2023, she was the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series, where she continues to volunteer as a board member. Zoe has a B.A. in Classics and Liberal Arts from Concordia University, and an MLIS from Dalhousie.

She has published two award-winning chapbooks: Public Transit (Leaf Press, 2015) and intertidal: poems from the littoral zone (Raven Chapbooks, 2022). Her work has also appeared in anthologies including Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (2022), and literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2026.

zoedickinson.com

Kyeren Regehr

Kyeren Regehr’s collection Cult Life, was a finalist for the 2021 ReLit Awards and The Victoria Butler Book Prize; Disassembling A Dancer won the inaugural Raven Chapbooks contest. Her poetry has been published in dozens of literary periodicals and anthologies in Canada, Australia, and the USA, including The Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, Best Canadian Poetry in English, and Best New Poets. Her work has been thrice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Awards. Kyeren holds a BFA and MFA in Writing, taught in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, and served as an editor on the poetry board of Canada's iconic literary periodical, The Malahat Review.

She works as a freelance literary editor and writing mentor, and has mentored poets through the Writer’s Union of Canada and the League of Canadian Poets. Her background is in professional dance and theatre, and she once found herself in Victoria’s Poetry Slam finals by accident. Kyeren is the 5th Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry.

kyerenregehr.ca