Please join us this Wednesday 15th December for what we think will be our last VIRTUAL reading at Poets Corner, featuring:
Wendy Donawa spent 36 years in Barbados as student, college instructor and museum curator. She has returned to her salty West Coast birthplace on the unceded lands of the Esquimalt and Songhees people, whom she acknowledges with respect and gratitude. From her writing desk, she can see sunset on the Salish Sea and Sooke Hills.
Her poems appear in Canadian anthologies, magazines, and solo chapbooks. Her début poetry collection, Thin Air of the Knowable (Brick Books, 2017) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert award. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions (Fontenac House, 2021) is her second book.
Chantal Gibson (chantalgibson.com) is an award-winning writer-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 in galleries and museums across Canada and the US.
Her debut book of poetry, 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 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship award, she teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
