Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Friday, October 13th at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books and Brick Books in launching Bradley Peters’ Sonnets from a Cell. Bradley will be joined by Rob Taylor, Kayla Czaga, Marc Perez, Nick Thran, and host, Sheryda Warrener.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free and required for entrance.
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.
About the book:
Sonnets from a Cell (Brick Books, 2023)
Poems for and about the incarcerated.
Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.
Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.
About the author:
Bradley Peters is a poet, actor, and carpenter from Mission, BC. His poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines, has been shortlisted for The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Award, has twice been the runner-up for Subterrain‘s Lush Triumphant Award, and in 2019 placed first in Grain Magazine‘s Short Grain contest. Sonnets from a Cell is his first book.
About the host:
Sheryda Warrener is a poet and teacher, most recently the author of Test Piece (Coach House Books, 2022). Her work has been published in the Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, The Believer, among other journals. A recipient of the Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for poetry and a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, she teaches poetry and interdisciplinary forms in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
About the readers:
Rob Taylor is the author of four poetry collections, including The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021). His fifth collection, Weather, will be published by Gaspereau Press in Spring 2024. He lives in Port Moody, on the unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh and Kwikwetlem peoples, and teaches creative writing at SFU and UFV, where he gets to work with talented writers who sometimes – like tonight! – go on to do great things.
Kayla Czaga is the author For Your Safety Please Hold On and Dunk Tank, which were both nominated for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Often anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her work also appears in PRISM International, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Her third collection, Midway, will be released by House of Anansi in 2024.
Marc Perez is the author of the chapbook, Borderlands (Anstruther Press, 2020), and the full-length collection, Dayo (Brick Books, Spring 2024). His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Fiddlehead, EVENT, decomp journal, CV2, PRISM international, among others. His poems are also forthcoming in Magdaragat: an Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Press, 2023). Born and raised in Manila, he lives with his wife and two children in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
Nick Thran is the author of three collections of poems. His second collection, Earworm (Nightwood Editions, 2011), won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. After stops in Toronto, Victoria, New York, Calgary, Madrid and Montreal, he now lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik, where, in addition to writing, he works as an editor and bookseller.