Dead Poets Reading Series

Join Massy Arts Society on Sunday, September 10th at 3pm for the next Dead Poets Reading Series, as deep threads of connection and solidarity are drawn between local, contemporary poets and a diverse array of poets from the past.

We welcome you to an afternoon reflection and celebration, as poetic conversation and recitation travel through time.

Registration is free/by donation, open to all and required for entrance.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

Featured readers and poets include:

Natalie Lim reading Jason Shinder

Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, B.C.). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, arrhythmia, was published in 2022 by Rahila’s Ghost Press.

Jason Shinder (1955–2008) was an American poet who authored three books and founded the YMCA National Writer’s Voice, a network of independent literary arts centers at YMCAs across the U.S. The network is dedicated to giving voice to people through accessible, quality-based, community-driven, innovative literary arts programming and is currently the U.S.’s largest network of literary arts centers.

Alongside his three books of poetry, Shinder also edited numerous anthologies, served as director of the Sundance Institute Writing Program, and was a Poet Laureate of Provincetown.

Shinder passed away in 2008 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia. His final book, Stupid Hope, was published posthumously.

Kim Trainor reading Nadia Anjuman

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Ledi(Bookhug, 2018) was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. A thin fire runs through me (icehouse / Goose Lane) appeared in Spring 2023 and A blueprint for survival will appear with Guernica Editions in the spring of 2024. She lives in Vancouver, ancestral, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations. www.kimtrainor.ca

Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) was born in Herat, Afghanistan in 1980. In 1996, she joined the underground Golden Needle Sewing School where young women students studied literature under the mentorship of Muhammad Ali Rahyab, using the guise of learning to sew in order to avoid detection by the Taliban government. Her first and only book of poetry was published in 2005, under the title گل دودی (“Gul-e-dodi,” literally, “Flower of Smoke,” translated as Smoke Bloom or Dark Flower.) She was beaten to death by her husband in November 2005, with whom she had a six-month-old son. The husband was given a five-year sentence but was freed after a few months.

Bronwen Tate reading Mina Loy

Bronwen Tate is the author of the poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore and a contributor to a collaborative book-length poem in homage to Bernadette Mayer called Midwinter Constellation. She teaches poetry, nonfiction, translation, and creative writing pedagogy at UBC, where she is also Undergraduate Chair. Her Substack newsletter Ok, But How? goes deep on process and includes snacks.

Mina Loy (1882-1966) was a poet, painter, and tireless experimenter, who has been called Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, feminist, conceptualist, Modernist and Postmodernist. Born in London, Loy studied painting in Munich and Paris, wrote about sex, childbirth, and art, and argued with Gertrude Stein, Filippo Marinetti, and other major avant-garde figures. Described by Ezra Pound as a poet of logopoeia (“a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas”), Loy published a poetry collection called Lunar Baedeker in 1923. Much of her most daring writing, including a feminist manifesto written in 1914, remained unpublished during her lifetime.

Brandon Wint reading Derek Walcott

Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist, educator and multi-disciplinary storyteller based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon is ever-grateful for the power of poetry as a spiritual technology and social force. He is devoted to using poetry as a tool for refining his sense of justice, love, and intimacy. Brandon Wint’s poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. His debut film, My Body Is A Poem/The World Makes With Me screened at DOXA documentary film festival in 2023.

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies in 1930. He published numerous poetry collections throughout his lifetime that dealt with the complexities of his African, Dutch, and English ancestry. A noted playwright, Walcott also founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop and wrote several plays. Walcott’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and he became the first Caribbean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1992. About Walcott’s work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said: He gives us more than himself or “a world”; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.