We find our spiritual selves in different places and yet it is in the calling that we find ourselves to be the same. Join these two poets as they open up doors to worlds right there for us to see.

Location: Poetry Tent

Type: Poetry, Reading

Sponsored by Pace Accounting and The Metro Vancouver Regional Cultural Grant

Host: Natalie Lang Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller she is the moderator (Caitlin Press)

Readers: Kevin Spenst, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press) | Jess Housty, Crushed Wild Mint (Nightwood Editions)

About The Host

Natalie Lang

Natalie Virginia Lang is an educator and writer, living on Sumas Mountain in Abbotsford B.C., the territory of the Stó:lō Nation. Lang holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University where she won multiple awards, including the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Award, the Julie Andreyev-Animal Lover Scholarship, the Ewan Clark Memorial Award, and a Graduate Fellowship. She also has an Education degree from Simon Fraser University and a degree in Literature and Anthropology from the University of the Fraser Valley. Her first book, Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller, was featured at the Victoria Festival of Authors in 2023. It is a collection of literary essays that meditate on the social, historical, cultural, and environmental losses suffered at the hands of infringement upon natural areas. Lang’s work has also appeared in The BC Review (formerly the Ormsby Review).

About The Readers

Kevin Spenst

Kevin Spenst is the author of sixteen chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry plus his newest collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.

Jess Housty

Jess Housty ('Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with their homelands, their extended family, and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.