Every year, the Association of Book Publishers of BC and TransLink collaborate to bring you excerpts from 10 of the newest books of poetry published in that year. Be the first to hear and meet the poets.

Location: Poetry Tent

Type: Reading, Poetry

Presented by: Word Vancouver · Association of Book Publishers of BC

Host: Evelyn Lau

Readers: Bradley Peters, Sonnets from a Cell (Brick Books) | Tiffany Stone, Super Small: Miniature Marvels of the Natural World (Greystone Books) | Michelle Poirier Brown, You Might Be Sorry You Read This (University of Alberta Press) | Christopher Levenson, Moorings (Caitlin Press) | Dina Del Bucchia, You’re Gonna Love This (Talonbooks) | Svetlana Ischenko, Nucleus: A Poet’s Lyrical Journey from Ukraine to Canada (Ronsdale Press) | Andrea Scott, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains (Raven Chapbooks/Rainbow Publishers)

About The Host

Evelyn Lau

Evelyn Lau is a lifelong Vancouverite who has authored fourteen books, including nine volumes of poetry. Her memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (HarperCollins, 1989), published when she was eighteen, was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Evelyn’s prose books have been translated into a dozen languages; her poetry has received the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award, the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, and a National Magazine Award, as well as nominations for a BC Book Prize and the Governor-General’s Award. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including the Best Canadian Poetry series. From 2011-2014, Evelyn served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.

About the 2024/25 Featured Poets

Bradley Peters

Bradley Peters is a poet and actor from the Fraser Valley, BC. His debut collection, Sonnets from a Cell, received the Raymond Souster award for best Canadian poetry collection of 2024, and is a finalist for this years BC and Yukon Book Prize.

Tiffany Stone

Tiffany Stone is an acclaimed children’s poet and picture book author, with twelve titles to her name, including Super Small: Miniature Marvels of the Natural World and Knot Cannot, a 2021 Gryphon Honor Book. Her work often combines poetry with facts. In addition to being an author, Tiffany has over two decades of experience as a children’s book editor, working with publishers such as Greystone Kids and Tradewind Books, as well as freelancing. She lives with her family in Maple Ridge, BC. You can visit Tiffany online at tiffanystone.ca.

Michelle Brown

Michelle Brown's work has been featured in Maisonneuve, THIS, The Walrus, Malahat Review, Arc, CV2, Grain, Prism, and The Puritan. She has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review's Open Season Award, the Relit Awards, CV2's Young Buck Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize. Michelle lives in Vancouver, on the unceded lands of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples.

Christopher Levenson

Christopher Levenson was born in London, England in 1934. After university he worked in Holland and Germany before coming to Canada in 1968 to teach English and Creative writing at Carleton University, Ottawa, where he co-founded and was first editor of Arc magazine. After retiring in 1999, he moved to Vancouver with his wife Oonagh, where he helped revive and run the Dead Poets Reading Series. He has published fourteen books of poetry and three chapbooks and is a regular reviewer of poetry for BC Review.

Dina Del Bucchia

Dina Del Bucchia is the author of five collections of poetry, Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013), Blind Items (Insomniac Press, 2014), Rom Com (Talonbooks, 2015), written with Daniel Zomparelli, It’s a Big Deal! (Talonbooks, 2019), and You’re Gonna Love This (Talonbooks, 2024). She also hosts Can’t Lit, a podcast on Canadian literature and culture, with Jen Sookfong Lee. Her short story, "Under the 'I'," was a finalist for the Writers' Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award in 2012. Her first collection of short stories, Don’t Tell Me What to Do, was published in fall 2017 with Arsenal Pulp Press. She is the Artistic Director of the Real Vancouver Writers' Series and is on the editorial board of the independent press fine press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she currently is a sessional instructor.

Svetlana Ischenko

Svetlana Ischenko is a poet, translator, former actress, and teacher. She was born in Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, where she worked as a stage actress for the Ukrainian National Theatre and acted in lead roles in several classic Ukrainian and European plays in the mid to late 1990s before she immigrated to Canada in 2001. In Ukraine, Svetlana also established herself as an award-winning poet. Her early books in Ukrainian are Chorals of the Earth and Sky (1995) and B-Sharp (1998). Svetlana has always kept close ties to Ukraine, and in her collection in Ukrainian, The Trees Have Flown Up In Couples (2019), won The Best Mykolaiv Book of the Year for 2019 in the poetry category. In Canada, over the past two decades, Svetlana has gone from writing solely in Ukrainian to translating her work from Ukrainian into English to writing in English. Nucleus: A Poet’s Lyrical Journey from Ukraine to Canada is her first poetry collection in English. Svetlana lives with her family in North Vancouver, where she teaches programs for children and adults in ballet, creative dance, visual arts, and musical theatre.

Andrea Scott

Andrea Scott is a mother, writer and teacher living in Victoria, B.C., the traditional territory of the Lekwungen Peoples. Publications include The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, Geist, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and The Antigonish Review. She was longlisted for the 2023 Room Poetry Contest and the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. She won the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the FBCW 2022 Literary Contest and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. Her first chapbook, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, was the winner of the 2024 Raven Chapbooks Poetry Contest.

Donna Kane

Donna Kane is the recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture, and the British Columbia Medal of Good Citizenship. Her poems, short fiction, reviews, and essays have been published widely. She is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse (2018), and four books of poetry. Her most recent book is Asterisms, published in 2024. Her 2020 collection, Orrery, was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. She divides her time between Rolla, BC, and Halifax, NS.

Michelle Poirier Brown

Michelle Poirier Brown is an internationally published writer, performer, and feminist activist. She is nêhiýaw-iskwêw and a citizen of the Métis Nation. Her debut book of poetry, You Might be Sorry You Read This, was published in the Robert Kroetsch Series from the University of Alberta Press in Spring 2022. Also in 2022, her chapbook of poems and photographs, Intimacies, was published by Jack Pine Press. She is the recipient of PRISM International’s Earle Birney Prize (2019) for her poem “Wake”. In 2021, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in Personal Journalism, and in 2022, CBC Books named her as one of their Writers to Watch. The song cycle, “The Length of Day” (Jeffrey Ryan, composer), was commissioned by the Pacific Opera Victoria in 2021. Her work has also appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Arc, CV2, The Malahat Review, The Sun, and Release Any Words Stuck Inside of You. Michelle was the first woman in Canada to win a court case establishing reasonable accommodation in the workplace for breastfeeding women. Now retired from a career as a professional writer and, later, conflict analyst and Federal Treaty Negotiator, she is giving voice to stories she has been sheltering for forty years. She continues to research and write about her Métis heritage and is currently working on a verbatim theatre piece on PTSD.

Justene Dion-Glowa

Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis poet, artist and workshop facilitator born in Winnipeg living in Secwepemcúl'ecw. They have spent over a decade in the non-profit sector. They are a Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity alum. Trailer Park Shakes is their debut collection of poetry.