Poet Grace

friday november 06
grace

Grace is a a queer Hong Kong-born settler living on the traditional and Treaty territory of the Anishinabek people. Her sophomore collection, Be Water, is published by Anvil Press. Her debut poetry collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak, is a Lambda Award finalist.

Be Water is a meditation on change—what happens when life pulls you from the city’s constant current into quieter, slower waters. In these poems, water becomes both vessel and mirror, reflecting how we adapt, how we hold grief and joy at once, and how we learn, finally, to flow. It's a collection about becoming and unbecoming, the histories we carry, and the futures we dare to imagine, and learning to move through the world - like water -with strength, grace, and unstoppable persistence.

Poet Onjana Yawnghwe

friday November 06
onjana yawnghwe

Onjana Yawnghwe is a Shan-Canadian writer and illustrator who lives in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Kwikwetlem First Nation. She is the author of two poetry books, Fragments, Desire (Oolichan Books, 2017), and The Small Way (Dagger Editions 2018), both of which were nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She works as a registered nurse. Her current projects include a graphic memoir about her family and Myanmar, and a book of cloud divination.

We Follow the River tells the story of one family’s escape from military violence in Myanmar, their exiled existence in Thailand, and their immigration to Canada with only a pile of beat-up suitcases on a luggage cart. It is about growing up as a foreigner in a foreign land, sifting through family history and grief, and alighting across cultures and continents to find a home.

Onjana Yawnghwe’s reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.

Poet Patrick Friesen

Friday november 13
Patrick Friesen

Patrick Friesen has published more than a dozen books of poetry, several co-translations of Danish poets, and a book of essays. He has collaborated on music/spoken word albums with Niko Friesen and various musicians. His most recent book is Sightings (CMU Press).

The poems in Patrick Friesen’s latest collection, Sightings, move between the visible and invisible, between the contradictions of human history and the immediacy of a complex present.  Friesen examines memory and music, rivers and personalities, open to all possibilities and sceptical of wisdom.  Instead, these poems rely on the kind of knowledge that comes from experience:  tremors and fragments riding on the movement of thinking.  The distance from Friesen’s first book, published fifty years ago, to this one, speaks to what it means to have known the world through poetry.

Poet Aaron Rabinowitz

Friday november 13
aaron Rabinowitz

Aaron Rabinowitz is the author of the poetry collection Suggestions (Gaspereau). His work appears or is forthcoming in journals such as Grain, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and The Southern Review. He has received prizes from PRISM international and Meridian—and has been cited as a Best American Essays Notable.

With a tender curiosity and an unsentimental eye, Aaron Rabinowitz performs an archaeology of the everyday, surfacing a beguiling mixture of quirky facts, family anecdotes, nonconformists, and bad jokes. In his hands these moments shimmer with newness. Suggestions is a Venn diagram that overlaps poetry with prose, environmental matters with personal concerns, humour with poignancy, and everyday language with emotional depth. Unassuming, playful, and wise, these prose poems show us how the past and memory continually shape our lives.

Saanich Community Poets Jesse Holth and Bennett Gilleland (right)

Friday november 20
jesse holth and bennett gillelanD

Jesse Holth is a writer, editor, and poet living in Lekwungen territory. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Room, Grain, CV2, Arc, and other publications. As Editor-in-Residence at The Ex-Puritan, she created the series Ecopoetics in the Era of Climate Crisis. She is the inaugural Community Poet (Poet Laureate) of Saanich.

Holth’s poetry has been anthologized in Resistance, edited by Sue Goyette, and The Nature of Our Times, which gathers over 200 voices from the arts, ecology, academia, and Indigenous communities, and features luminaries such as Jane Hirshfield, Camille Dungy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Arthur Sze.

Bennett Gilleland is a queer Canadian poet, journalist, and spoken-word performer from Toronto, Ontario. He has been published in The Tyee, Island Writer Magazine, The Martlet, and was winner of This Side of West's Prose and Poetry Contest. He is currently the Youth Poet Laureate of Saanich, British Columbia.

Poets Louise Bernice Halfe - Sky Dancer, and Gregory Scofield

saturday november 21
Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer, & Gregory Scofield

Planet Earth Poetry and Open Space Arts Society are delighted to present a special evening with two acclaimed poets: Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer , and Gregory Scofield. Halfe and Scofield will read from their work, followed by a conversation with celebrated poet Tim Lilburn.

Louise Bernice Halfe’s reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.

PLEASE NOTE: This event will take place at:
Open Space Arts Society
510 Fort Street, 2nd Floor
Accessible by lift
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

friday november 27
billeh nickerson

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm on Friday November 27 for award-winning poet Billeh Nickerson.

Billeh Nickerson is a Vancouver-based author of seven books, including the City of Vancouver Book Award nominated Artificial Cherry. His most recent collection, Blood Clot Banana Bag, was published by Anvil Press in Fall 2026. He’s a longtime Creative Writing instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

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 Billeh Nickerson

friday november 27
billeh Nickerson

Billeh Nickerson is a Vancouver-based author of seven books, including the City of Vancouver Book Award nominated Artificial Cherry. His most recent collection, Blood Clot Banana Bag, was published by Anvil Press in Fall 2026. He’s a longtime Creative Writing instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Blood Clot Banana Bag delves into the privilege of universal health care through the lens of the author’s trademark humour and exacting details. It also explores his return to Vancouver’s historic Lee Building, one of the city’s first high-rises, and offers readers a series of meditations on everything from vinyl 45 records to quicksand and Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon.