The May edition of the Dead Poets Reading Series will feature these amazing poets:
Dora Prieto reading Enheduanna (2286–2251 BCE)
Jaeyun Yoo reading Yi Sang (1910–1937)
Curtis LeBlanc reading Phillip Levine (1928–2016)
Alex Leslie reading Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972)
Date/Time: May 11th, 3:00pm – 4:45pm
Location:
We are excited to have our first reading at our new home:
Outsiders and Others
(#100 – 938 Howe Street, Vancouver). This beautiful art gallery is full of great outsider art and is fully wheelchair accessible.
This is a masks-required event to keep things as safe as possible for everyone.
Reader Bios
Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet and psychiatrist who is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. She was the winner of The Fiddlehead’s 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. Her work has been selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2025 and nominated for Best of the Net. She published a collaborative chapbook, Brine, with Harbour Centre 5, and her first solo chapbook is forthcoming with Baseline Press in 2026.
Dora Prieto is an emerging poet based in Vancouver and Mexico City. She is currently editing her debut manuscript. Her work appears in publications including Acentos Review, Capilano Review, Catapult, and Maisonneuve. She has received numerous accolades and is co-translating an award-winning poetry book titled JAWS by Xitlalitl Rodríguez. She runs El Mashup, a hybrid poetry workshop for Latinx youth.
Curtis LeBlanc is a poet and writer residing in Vancouver. His debut novel, Sunsetter, was published in 2023. He is also the author of two poetry collections: Little Wild and Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation.
Alex Leslie has published two collections of short fiction and two poetry collections, most recently Vancouver for Beginners, which won the Western Canada Jewish Book Prize. Their stories appear in Best Canadian Stories, EVENT, Plenitude, Yolk, and Isele, where their piece won the 2024 fiction prize.
Dead Poets Bios
Enheduanna, the first known writer in history, was a poet, priestess, and political force in ancient Sumer. Daughter of King Sargon, she served as High Priestess of the moon god Nanna. Her hymns to Inanna combined devotion with fierce defiance. Exiled during a coup, she channeled her grief and faith into verse, carving a legacy that still resonates 43 centuries later.
Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a Korean writer, poet, and architect known for his modernist and avant-garde work. Living during the Japanese occupation of Korea, he wrote in both Korean and Japanese, experimenting with language and poetic form—ranging from stream-of-consciousness to mathematical diagrams. His work explored themes of fragmentation and alienation in the self, relationships, and society. In 1936, he was arrested by the Japanese police for his “unsound” ideas, and he died the following year of tuberculosis at the age of 26. Though unrecognized during his lifetime, Yi Sang is now considered a revolutionary figure in Korean literature.
Philip Levine (1928–2016) was born in industrial Detroit to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. His father died when Levine was five, and by the age of fourteen, he was working in auto factories—experiences he later captured in some of his most well-known poems. He sought, as he said, "to find a voice for the voiceless." Levine earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied with John Berryman, whom he called his "one great mentor." He later moved to California to study poetry at Stanford University and taught at California State University for over 30 years. The author of over twenty books of poetry, essays, and translations, Levine received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth (1994), the National Book Award for What Work Is (1991), and both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979). He served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2012.
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) was an Argentine poet born in Buenos Aires to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. She published several poetry collections during her lifetime, including La tierra más ajena (1955), La última inocencia (1956), Las aventuras perdidas (1958), Árbol de Diana (1960), Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), and El infierno musical (1971). In addition to poetry, she published the prose essay La condesa sangrienta (1971), a meditation on a 16th-century Hungarian countess allegedly responsible for the torture and murder of over 600 girls. Pizarnik’s work has been translated into English in collections such as Alejandra Pizarnik: Selected Poems (translated by Cecilia Rossi, 2010) and Extracting the Stone of Madness (translated by Yvette Siegert, 2016).
