[currently under construction!]

The current Dead Poets Reading Series team is made up of Lauren Peat, Raoul Fernandes, Elena Johnson, Kevin Spenst and Hope Lauterbach.

Lauren Peat's debut poetry chapbook, Future Tense, was published by Baseline Press in 2024. Her poems, essays, and translations from French have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Only Poems, The Ex-Puritan, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, and World Literature Today, among other places. Her many collaborations with composers are also featured in the repertoire of acclaimed vocal ensembles across North America. Translation Editor of the online poetry magazine Volume, she lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Raoul Fernandes lives with his wife and two sons on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). His first collection of poems, Transmitter and Receiver (Nightwood Editions, 2015) won the Dorothy Livesay

Award and Debut-litzer Award for Poetry in 2016. He is the Poetry Editor for EVENT and works in public libraries in Vancouver. Find him on bluesky at

raoulfernandes.bsky.social and at raoulfernandes.com

Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems set at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. She works as an editor and writing mentor, and is a co-editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021). The French translation of her book, Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine (tr. Luba Markovskaia), was published in 2021 and won the John Glassco Prize.

Kevin Spenst is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, (both with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press), Ward Notes (the serif of nottingham), and Flip Flop Faces and Unexpurgated Lives (JackPine Press). His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including subTerrain magazine, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, BafterC, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2014. Kevin has been a DPRS coordinator since 2017.