On Thursday, July 28 at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, and poets Cecily Nicholson, Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and annie ross for an in-person poetry reading event to celebrate love, land, and our responsibility to each other.

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

This event is free + open to all of our community, and registration is mandatory.

Covid Protocols: For all in-person events, attendees must provide proof of vaccination, wear a mask (N95 masks are encouraged and recommended as they offer the best protection), and consent to having their temperature checked at the front door. We ask that if you are showing any symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

Poets

Cecily Nicholson is an Ontario poet, author and administrator based in British Columbia. She has written three poetry collections, Triage, From the Poplars and Wayside Sang. Nicholson has been a writer-in-residence for Simon Fraser University and the administrator of Vancouver-based artist co-operative Gallery Gachet. In 2015, she won the Dorothy Livesay prize for poetry for From the Poplars. Her collection Wayside Sang won the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Nicholson wrote the essay tally recounted for the special CBC Books series Borders.

Rita Wong was born in and grew up in Calgary. She taught English in China, Japan and Canada, and currently lives in Vancouver where she remains active as a writer, activist, and archivist. In 1997 she received the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop emerging writer award. Wong has a Masters degree in English from the University of Alberta and a Master in Archival Studies from the University of British Columbia. Wong’s Ph.D. dissertation from Simon Fraser University (2002) is entitled: Provisional Mobilities: Rethinking Labour Through Asian Racialization in Literature. She is currently teaching at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her most recent collection, Current, Climate: The Poetry of Rita Wong was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in June 2021.

Stephen Collis is a Canadian poet and professor. Collis is the author of several books of poetry, including On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010) and three parts of the ongoing “Barricades Project”: Anarchive (New Star, 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), and To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013). He is also the author of three books of non-fiction: Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talonbooks, 2018), Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012), and Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007). In 2011, he won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for the collection On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). He wrote Mine in 2001, Anarchive in 2005 and The Commons in 2008, and was previously shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award in 2006 for Anarchive. His 2016 work Once in Blockadia was shortlisted for the 2017 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness. In 2019, he won the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. He teaches poetry and American literature at Simon Fraser University. A History of the Theories of Rain was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry at the 2021 Governor General’s Awards.

annie grace ross is the daughter of a strong traditional Maya mother, auntie, and WWII veteran father (Sydney Mines, NS). She began education at home with plants, animals, art, Indigenous handwork, storytelling, and history in Compton, California. She is now working as an artist/teacher in the Canadian west, with extraordinary ongoing working relationships with friends/family from many First Nations/Indigenous communities regarding the testimony of Home/Lands and Sacred Beings. annie grace ross is a poet, weaver, sculptor, printmaker, researcher and educator working with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver. Her poems have appeared in publications such as the Capilano Review (Fall 2017), Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review (September 2017), The Maynard (Spring 2017, Fall 2015), Yellow Medicine Review (Fall 2014), Project Intersect Clarion Call (September 2014) and Quills Poetry Magazine (September 2014).