Three poets share their work and their lived experiences as families shift, move, and mitigate immigration and relocation.

Location: Room C400

Type: Poetry, Reading

Host: Daniela Elza

Readers: Svetlana Ischenko, Nucleus: A Poet’s Lyrical Journey from Ukraine to Canada (Ronsdale Press) | Onjana Yawnghwe, We Follow the River (Caitlin Press) | Holly Flauto, Permission to Settle (Anvil Press)

About The Moderator

Daniela Elza

Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. Her latest poetry collections are the broken boat (2020) & slow erosions (2020)—a chapbook written in collaboration with poet Arlene Ang. Daniela’s work on preserving and growing affordable homes in her community translated into her forthcoming poetry collection SCAR/CITY (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Spring, 2025). Daniela is the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry. She lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver. When she is not writing she works as an editor, mentor, and creative writing instructor.

About The Readers

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.

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.

Holly Flauto

Holly Flauto(she/they) is a poet, story-teller, learner and instructor living and writing on the traditional, ancestral and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Selilwitulh Nations. Their debut poetry-memoir collection, Permission to Settle (Anvil Press, 2024), explores immigration to Canada as a modern-day settler. Their fiction and creative memoir has previously been published in The Ex-Puritan, Joyland, and The Rusty Toque, and they perform as Stella Palermo on the local story and poetry slam stages. Holly teaches creative writing, academic writing and literature at Capilano University.