Poet Elizabeth Bachinsky

friday april 10
elizabeth bachinsky

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of six books of poetry, including Home of Sudden Service, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Real Grownup (Nightwood, 2026) is her latest. She lives in New Westminster, BC, on the traditional territories of the Qayqayt First Nation. She teaches creative writing at Douglas College. . 

Here’s a description of her latest book: “If Lorna Crozier, Susan Musgrave, Bronwen Wallace, and Joanne Arnott had been in the mosh pit at fifteen when Nirvana performed at the PNE Forum, this is what their poems might have looked like. In Real Grownup, Elizabeth Bachinsky plain-talks her way through the same gritty landscape that illuminated the poetry of her youth, but shows it from the perspective of a person at a waypoint in life, taking stock of the journey: birth, childhood, sex, loss, joy and death.”

Poet Louie Leyson

friday april 10
Louie leyson

Louie Leyson was awarded the CBC Literary Prize in Nonfiction (2023), longlisted for the CBC Literary Prize in Poetry (2024), and is the recipient of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. You can find their works in Nimrod Journal, The Malahat Review, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Poet Garth Martens

friday april 10
garth martens

Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and Who Else in the Dark Headed There, forthcoming in April 2026. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award. He lives in Victoria, BC..

A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he’s becoming. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.

Poet Brandi Bird

friday april 17
brandi bird

Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree and Métis writer from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live on Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh & Musqueam land (Burnaby, B.C). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (Anansi, 2023), won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert, Raymond Souster and Governor General’s awards. 

Brandi Bird’s Pitiful revels in the grimy and revolting poetics inherent in the relationships between sexuality, eating disorders and surveillance in our settler-colonial apocalypse. Bird critiques restraint, inaction and self-victimization through their incisive poems that challenge the concept of safety and asks who, if anyone, will be rescued? Pitiful is a confession as much as a riot and Bird understands the worst thing a victim can be is boring.  

Poet Leanne Dunic

friday april 17
leanne dunic

Leanne Dunic is a biracial and bisexual multidisciplinary artist. She is the fiction editor at Tahoma Literary Review, a mentor at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio, and the leader of the band The Deep Cove. Her most recent project is a book of lyric prose and photographs entitled, Wet (Talonbooks 2024), which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Leanne lives on the unceded and occupied Traditional Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Praise for Salt Rich:

Dunic paints a portrait that is loving and bittersweet—of two people who harrowingly escape 1950s Yugoslavia for a quiet, simple, stubborn existence living among, and off, the natural world of their adopted homeland.

—Mary Donnelly, author of Mad World Colored Oil

April 24
pep in the afternoon!

friday april 24
rob mclennan

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday 24 April for award-winning poet rob mclennan.
rob mclennan is the author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press) .

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 rob mclennan

FRIDAY april 24
ROB MCLENNAN

rob mclennan has written more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023).

Poet Phoebe Wang

friday april 24
phoebe wang

Phoebe Wang is a Toronto-based author of Admission Requirements (McClelland and Stewart, 2017), Waking Occupations, (McClelland and Stewart, 2022) and Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft and Community (Assembly Press, 2024.) She is currently a Writing Consultant at OCAD University. More of her work is at www.alittleprint.com.

Waking Occupations is a four-part meditation on what it means to live on occupied land and in colonial time. In a series of aubades and elegies, the subject of these poems considers her commitments, complicities and exclusions. She searches for the figure of the female artist as a time travelling women through the gallery of memory, encountering her mother, and the objects and works of art that hold us accountable. Waking Occupations considers what we carry from previous generations and the cyclical nature of the work that uplifts us.

Poet Anna Yin

friday april 24
anna yin

Anna Yin is Mississauga’s inaugural Poet Laureate (2015–2017). She has authored seven poetry collections and four translation books. Her work has won awards in Canada, the U.S., and China, and appears in ARC Poetry, The New York Times, Queen’s Quarterly, China Daily, and on CBC Radio. She teaches Poetry Alive.

Breaking into Blossom is a lyrical journey through migration, memory, and renewal. Moving between Chinese and Canadian landscapes, Anna Yin’s poems weave personal experience with history, social reflection, and moments of quiet wonder. Amid uncertainty and change, the collection seeks serenity, resilience, and unexpected beauty. With imagery drawn from nature, family, and everyday encounters, these poems explore the delicate balance between hardship and hope, revealing how even life’s most uncertain seasons can open into transformation—and blossom.