We have a great September edition of the Dead Poets Reading Series coming up! We are also thrilled be part of the fabulous Word Vancouver festival! Check out their other great events.
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) read by Jónína Kirton
Parveen Shakir (1952-1994) read by Rahat Kurd
Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) read by Rita Wong
Charles Tomlinson (1927-2015) read by Alan Hill
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance. Register here.
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.
THE DEAD POETS:
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) was an American poet whose works examine family life, racism, and gender. Born in Depew, New York, of a family that was descended from slaves, she attended Howard University from 1953 to 1955 and graduated from Fredonia State Teachers College (now State University of New York College at Fredonia) in 1955. In 1969 her first book, a collection of poetry titled Good Times, was published. Clifton worked in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland where she produced two further books of poetry, Good News About the Earth (1972) and An Ordinary Woman (1974). Clifton’s later poetry collections included Next: New Poems (1987), Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (1991), The Terrible Stories (1996), Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 (2000), and Mercy (2004). The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton: 1965–2010 (2012) aggregated much of her oeuvre, including a substantial number of unpublished poems.
Clifton’s many children’s books, written expressly for an African American audience, include All Us Come Cross the Water (1973), Three Wishes (1976), and My Friend Jacob (1980). She also wrote an award-winning series of books featuring events in the life of Everett Anderson, a young Black boy Clifton served as poet laureate of Maryland from 1979–85. Among her many honours was the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2007).
Parveen Shakir (1952-1994), born in Karachi, Pakistan, began to write poetry in Urdu at a young age. Her first book, KHUSHBU [Fragrance] was published in 1976, and was widely acclaimed for her contemporary approach to classical ghazal poetics, grounding lived experience in a feminine voice. Shakir was tragically killed in a car accident in Islamabad at the age of 42. She left behind a young son and several published poetry volumes; one final work, KAF-E-AINA [The Mirror’s Edge] was published posthumously.
Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was a Palestinian writer, poet, translator, university professor and activist from the occupied Gaza Strip. On December 6, 2023, he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, sister and their children in Israel’s ongoing genocidal siege of Gaza of 2023.
Charles Tomlinson (1927-2015) was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in 1927. Fluent in German, French, and Italian, he read English at Queen’s College Cambridge, studying with poet Donald Davie, who was an early influence and later became a close friend. Tomlinson taught elementary school before joining the University of Bristol, where he taught for 36 years. His collections of poetry include Relations and Contraries (1951), American Scenes and Other Poems (1966), To Be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant (1968), The Shaft (1978), Jubilation (1995), Skywriting and Other Poems (2003), for which he won the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and New Collected Poems (2009).
THE READERS:
Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Treaty 1, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis. She graduated from the SFU Writer’s Studio in 2007 and since that time has published three books with Talonbooks. She was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, was released in 2022. It merges poetry and lyrical memoir to take us on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on her Métis family. She currently lives in New Westminster BC, the unceded territory of the Qayqayt Nation and other down river Coast Salish Nations, a hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking people.
Rahat Kurd: Rahat Kurd’s publications include THE CITY THAT IS LEAVING FOREVER: KASHMIRI LETTERS (co-authored with Sumayya Syed, Talonbooks 2021) and COSMOPHILIA (Talonbooks 2015).
Rita Wong lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories, also known as Vancouver, where she attends to questions of respect for water, decolonization, ecology and climate justice. Co-editor of the anthology Downstream: Reimagining Water (2017) with Dorothy Christian, Wong is the author of current, climate (2021), beholden (2018, with Fred Wah), undercurrent (2015), perpetual (2015, with Cindy Mochizuki), sybil unrest (2008, with Larissa Lai), forage (winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011 and short-listed for the 2008 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry), and monkeypuzzle (1998). She has received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writer Award.
Alan Hill was born in the UK and immigrated to Canada in 2005. He is the former Poet Laureate of the City of New Westminster, BC (2017-2020), former president of the Royal City Literary Arts Society (RCLAS), and was the editor and curator of A Poetry of Place: Journeys Across New Westminster, published in partnership with New Westminster Arts Services. His writing has been published internationally and his poetry has appeared in Event, CV2, Canadian Literature, The Antigonish Review, subTerrain, Poetry is Dead, among others. He works in the field of community development and immigrant settlement and lives in New Westminster, BC. His book ‘In The Blood’, was published by Caitlin Press in 2022.
