Poet Jordan Redekop-Jones

friday october 02
jordan redekop-Jones

Jordan Redekop-Jones is a mixed Indigenous/Anglo-Indian writer from Vancouver. She is the winner of the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for Poetry, was a recipient of a 2024 Indigenous Voices Award in the unpublished poetry category, and won the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize. 

Her work has appeared in Prism International, Arc Poetry, The Ex-Puritan, SAD Mag, Rungh and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio and is currently doing her MA in English Literature at Simon Fraser University.

friday october 09
shani mootoo

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday 09 October for award-winning poet Shani Mootoo.
Shani Mootoo is the the author of six novels, three collections of poetry, and one short story collection. She is a four-time Giller Prize nominee, and her work has been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.

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.

friday october 09
celebrating the 60th birthday
of the league of canadian poets
with poets elee kraljii gardiner,
john barton and shani mootoo

The League is Canada’s only national professional poetry organization. It supports the poetry community through events, networking, projects, publications, mentoring, awards, education, professional development, and advocacy, while working to expand the audiences and opportunities available to poets. 

Planet Earth Poetry is honoured to celebrate this landmark anniversary year, and is grateful to the League for its long-standing support of the series, of poets, and poetry. 

Poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner

friday october 09
elee kraljii Gardiner

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, sometimes, forest from Talonbooks, which practices a theory of hylofeminism, an inclusive and feminism of the forest. A frequent collaborator, she works across disciplines and administers the Warland Award for hybrid literature. She is the seventh poet laureate of Vancouver. 

sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. Considering how networks of lateral support mitigate and challenge hierarchical, individualistic structures, sometimes, forest develops a theory of hylofeminism that attends to a deep, communal connection with nature as a relational way of being with the self and the more-than-human world.

Poet John Barton

friday october 09
john barton

John Barton is a poet, essayist, editor, and writing mentor. His  poetry collections 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, Compulsory Figures, and Labyrinth. He lives in Victoria. 

The twenty sonnets in John Barton’s Labyrinth are anchored by a corona inspired by the Irving Park labyrinth in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood. Unlike mazes, labyrinths lead to no dead ends. These poems follow John’s journey in and out of the self. Walking the labyrinth’s loops and digressions shaped in turn how he thinks about the world during and after the Covid pandemic, all while the park, under a rain of cherry blossoms, filled with tents pitched by the homeless. 

Poet Shani Mootoo

friday october 09
shani mootoo

Shani Mootoo is the author of six novels, three collections of poetry, and one short story collection. She is a four-time Giller Prize nominee, and her work has been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.

Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean. In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy.

friday october 16
Victoria festival of authors
and planet earth poetry present:
beyond witness: poetry & the living world

OCT 16th 7:30PM at Langham Court Theatre
PLEASE NOTE: There will be NO EVENT at Russell Books on Oct 16th.

Tickets to this event begin at as little as $6.73, so instead of adding a donation to the PEP basket this week, we warmly invite you to purchase a ticket and support our city’s superb writer’s festival. There’s also the option to attend the livestream, but, if at all possible, please join us in person at Langham Court Theatre and help make this a very special and memorable event for everyone!

Check out the weeks events at Victoria Festival of Authors here, including interviews and mroe: https://victoriafestivalofauthors.ca/

How do we belong to the living world without pretending we stand outside it? Four poets ask what comes after observation: attention, reciprocity, humour, grief, resistance, nourishment, and kinship.
In Blue thinks itself within me, Kim Trainor turns to lichen, lyric form, and the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek blockades to ask what poetry can do in a time of ecological crisis.

Elizabeth Philips’s The Time of the Great Singing listens closely to rivers, birds, snow, parents, and loss, refusing to separate elegy from praise.

Zoe Dickinson’s Staff Picks for Invertebrates brings together the Pacific Ocean, bookstore wit, and creaturely imagination in poems of daily relation. Jess Housty’s How to Nourish a Cannibal offers poems of land, body, ancestry, abundance, and living within sacred responsibility. Together, these books invite us beyond witness and into the difficult, beautiful practice of belonging.

Poet Rob Budde

FRIDAY october 23
ROB budde

Rob Budde has taught creative writing at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George BC since 2001. He has published nine books (poetry, novels, interviews, and short fiction). Current projects include Testes (a poetic engagement with maleness) and The Salmon Wars (a speculative fiction trilogy about land defense in a near-future Northern BC). 

Panax is a cross-genre engagement with the Northern BC/Coastal plant Devil’s Club (also Oplopanax Horridus and Hoolhghulh). Panax is a blend of contemporary ecopoetics, Ecocritical and Animal Studies thought, and decolonization and counter-colonial thought. Most importantly, it is a record of the poet’s developing relationship to the being called Hoolhghulh.

Poet Daniel Scott

friday october 23
daniel scott

Daniel Scott has published six previous books of poetry, including Travels with Athóma and Aftertime, four chapbooks and edited Voicing Suicide, an anthology of suicide poems. He won a one-act playwriting competition in 1984. He is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Federation of BC Writers.

SUBSIDENCE: Coming to Quiet ~

”I have a sense of settling as I look back and write about dying and loss. I have gathered here themes, dreams, events and people who dominate my writerly landscape. Many poems in this collection are portraits of a kind, some self-portraits. Included are some older poems that reflect my return to images and past experiences, especially from childhood. It is a personal journey that speaks to the cycle of life and common experience.”

friday october 30
vend-a-verse launch

Please join us for the launch of Planet Earth Poetry’s second Vend-A-Verse project.

What’s the verse that can happen?