Our last reading before the Summer is on May 17th, 3pm, at Outsiders and Others (938 Howe St #100)! Here's the awesome lineup:
Yilin Wang reads Qiu Jin (1875-1907)
Cristina Holman reads Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)
Annie Lafleur reads Danielle Collobert (1940 -1978), translated by Norma Cole
Reminder that this event is masks-required and there will be masks available at the door.
Readers Bios:
Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. Poems from Daniela’s sixth collection SCAR/CITY (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) were longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Her debut essay collection "Is This an Illness or an Accident?” (Caitlin Press, 2025) delves into the conflicts and contradictions of what it means to belong, to work, and find home. Daniela was the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry & the 2010 Pandora’s Collective Citizenship Award. When she is not writing or volunteering in her community she works as a creative writing instructor, editor, & mentor on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver.
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Chinese diaspora author, poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024) is the first book of translations from Chinese (Mandarin) to win the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canada in the prize’s 40-year history. Her translations of poems by Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin received international attention after being used by the British Museum in a major exhibit without credit or permission for over a month, an incident that made international headlines in the BBC, CBC, The Guardian, and more, and was named one of the “defining art events of 2023” by ARTnews. She is currently at work on a book-length translation of Qiu Jin's poems.
Annie Lafleur is a writer, performer and researcher. At Le Quartanier, she has published four books, the most recent of which, Puberté (2023), won the Prix francophone international at the Festival de la poésie de Montréal, the Grand Prix Québecor at the Festival international de la poésie de Trois-Rivières, and a nomination for the Prix Alain-Grandbois from the Académie des lettres du Québec. Also critically acclaimed, Ciguë (2019) and Bec-de-lièvre (2016) were finalists for the Prix des libraires du Québec and the Governor General's Literary Awards. She is currently an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, in British-Colombia.
Cris Holman is a poet, librarian and ceramic artist living and working on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh). Their debut chapbook, published with Artspeak Gallery in 2018, is titled Stop Wincing/We’re Fine and their second chapbook, Repeater, was published in 2021 by Zed Press. Their work can be found in Bad Nudes magazine, Poetry is Dead, The Capilano Review, Scrivener Creative Review, and The /tƐmz/ Review. They are working on their first full-length collection, titled Glaze.
Dead Poet Bios:
Lyubomir Levchev (1935- 2019) was born in Troyan, Bulgaria, in 1935 and is regarded as one of the great poets of Eastern Europe. He has served as Chairman of the Union of Bulgarian Writers, First Deputy Minister for Culture of Bulgaria, and Editor-in-Chief of Literaturen Front. He has over thirty poetry books and three novels published in Bulgarian. The latest two among those are the autobiographical novel Lament of the Dead Time (2011) and the collection of selected and new poems 77 Poems (2012). Over 58 of his books have been translated and published in 36 countries worldwide. He has been awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry of the French Academy and received the honorary title of "Knight of Poetry" from the French Government.
Qiu Jin (1875-1907) was a Chinese feminist. revolutionary, poet, essayist, and the founder of the publication China Women's News. In her brief thirty-two years of life, she wrote over two hundred classical chinese poems, most of which were compiled and published posthumously.
Danielle Collobert (1940 -1978) was a French writer born in 1940. During her lifetime, she published four books of poetry: Meurtre (1964), Dire I et II (1972), Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). She also travelled widely, visiting Algeria, Indonesia, Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, Mexico and New York. Collobert ended her life in her Paris hotel room on 23 July 1978, her birthday. Her complete works, Œuvres I and Œuvres II, were published by P.O.L in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Annie Lafleuer will be reading excerpts from It Then and Notebooks: 1956–1978, translated by Norma Cole in 1989 and 2003, respectively. As a female poet, Annie Lafleuer shares Collobert’s preoccupation with the “biological malaise of living, which is to say, of thinking,” as well as her viscerality and her vision of the self as being forever split.
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet and playwright whose leftist politics and queer identity led to his 1936 assassination by fascist soldiers. The homoerotic themes in Lorca's early work were carefully veiled, although this suppressive impulse lessened in his later work.
