FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

30th birthday event - book sale & all-open-mic fundraiser! 

BOOK SALE:

We’ll be selling gently used books for $5 each. All proceeds from the book sale will go towards our season, so bring cash and your reading glasses.

ALL OPEN MIC:

Share a poem at the open mic from any poet featured at PEP throughout the past 30 years.

Our usual open mic rules apply - max 3 minutes/one poem

HOW TO SIGN UP FOR THE OPEN MIC:
Sign up is between 7:00–7:20pm, in person at Russell Books Victoria.

Please note that because September 5 is an All-Open-Mic night, we will not be livestreaming on Zoom. Livestreaming resumes on Sept 12th.

Poet Ellen Jane Shi

Friday, september 12 -

in collaboration with brick books:
jane shi

Jane Shi lives on the occupied and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. She is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang'e on Read (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022). Her debut poetry collection echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. 

In Jane Shi’s collection of poems echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.

Jane Shi’s reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.

Poet Hari Alluri

friday, september 12
in collaboration with brick books:
hari Alluri

Hari Alluri is the author of Tabako on the Windowsill (Brick Books), The Flayed City (Kaya Press), and chapbook Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press). He is an award-winning poet, editor, and facilitator who collaborates locally and internationally, and his work appears widely in anthologies, journals, and online venues..

Tabako on the Windowsill (Brick Books) contends tenderly with multiple forms of intimacy and loss, initiating us into the deep work of transformation. Hari Alluris’ poems, shaped around portals and thresholds, are guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, grief, and joy, to multiple beginnings. In this exquisite collection, Alluri offers moments of living myth, where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.

Hari Alluri’s reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
stephanie roberts

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, for Stephanie Roberts.

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 Stephanie Roberts

friday, september 19
stephanie roberts

Stephanie Roberts was born in Panama, grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and has lived most of her life in the province of Quebec.

She is the author of rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Jurors said of the collection, “Roberts speaks with clarity and certainty, in a firm and haunting voice. This is an author clearly driven by a need to articulate what is missed.”

Her work has been widely featured and anthologized in POETRY, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Crannóg Magazine, Atlanta Review, The League of Canadian Poets, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. A 2021 Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient, her work also won first place in The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press). 

Poet Chris Hutchinson

friday, september 19
chris hutchinson

Chris Hutchinson is the author of five previous poetry books. He has lived all over North America—from Dawson City, Yukon, to Brooklyn, New York—working in brunch restaurants and, more recently, teaching creative writing. He is currently an English faculty member at MacEwan University, located  on Treaty 6 territory.

In Lost Signal, Chris Hutchinson celebrates the resilience and adaptability of language, while locating the tipping points of our ongoing environmental, informational, and humanitarian crises. Subtle semantic shifts mirror ideological rifts — yet lyricism thrives, along with a diversity of perspectives, forms, and styles, affirming faith in the power of the human spirit to challenge the insidious forces shaping our collective present.

Poet John Barton

friday, september 26
john barton

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

In Compulsory Figures, John Barton reflects on his childhood in Alberta, a close succession of family deaths, and coming of age as a gay man during the AIDS pandemic, and the struggle for equality rights. He broadens his inquiry to wrestle with settler colonialism, patriarchy, and the stigmatizing impact of internalized homophobia. Lyrical and thought-provoking, the poems in his thirteenth collection plunge into the depths of history, grief, and the unshakeable power of everyone and everything that shapes a life. 

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
therese svoboda

Terese Svoboda, a Guggenheim Fellow, has published 8 books of poetry, most recently Theatrix: Poetry Plays (Anhinga Press, 2021). Nova Scotian poet Virginia Konchan called it “is a tour de force collection that explodes our notion of the fourth wall.” Svoboda’s 24th book, and second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, appears in October.

Theatrix: Poetry Plays , written like a stage drama, is full of word play and humour, though not exactly Freytag’s five-part dramatic pyramid. Theatre tropes examine how we “act” in everyday relationships and “play” in an “all the world’s a stage” way, with references to Greek theatre and Shakespeare. The book also enters into a “theatre of the absurd” where comedy and tragedy are separated by a thin line, a place that can never be fully articulated outside of play, or the “tricks” in the feminized title.