Join us for In/Verse on Saturday, March 12 at 1:55 pm PT by registering here (bcwriters.ca/events-for-writers) and a Zoom link for the event will be sent to you. When it’s time for the event you can click on the Zoom link to join the event.

Speakers:

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her visual art has been exhibited across Canada and the US. Her debut poetry collection, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019) explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, literature. It won the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021) brings a critical lens to the representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media. Recipient of the 20213M National Teaching Fellowship, she teaches in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Barbara Pelman is a retired high school English teacher, and poet. She is a frequent participant and assistant at Planet Earth Poetry. She has three published books of poetry: One Stone (Ekstasis Editions 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press 2008) and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press 2017) and a chapbook Aubade Amalfi (Rubicon Press 2016). In 2018 her glosa, “Nevertheless” won the Malahat Open Season Poetry Contest. Previously, in 2004 and in 2014, she won the BC Federation of Writers’ poetry contest. Her poems can be found in literary journals and the anthologies “Refugium” and “Sweet Water” (Caitlin Press), and “In Fine Form” (Caitlin Press).

Marc Perez is the author of the poetry chapbook, Borderlands (Anstruther Press, 2020). His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in decomp journal, CV2, PRISM international, Vallum, TAYO, and Ricepaper. He has a BFA  from the UBC School of Creative Writing, and he has received support from BC Arts Council.  Originally from the Philippines, he lives in unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, where he currently works on a full-length poetry collection. He writes in English as a Second Language.

Host:

Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poems, The Dance Floor Tilts and Nothing You Can Carry and a former journalist. Her work has won multiple awards, including the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry in 2019. Susan’s poems appear in anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., have ridden Vancouver buses as part of Poetry in Transit and even shown up in the woods around Whistler. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional territory of the Squamish people.