Entrancing, surprising, and memorable: The Poetry Bash is a gateway to discovering new-to-you poets or hearing your favourites. Hosted by Aislinn Hunter, award-winning poet and editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2025, this year’s poets include: Stephen Collis (The Middle), who investigates threatened climate futures in poetics of displacement and wandering; Jess Housty, whose Crushed Wild Mint embodies land love, and ancestral wisdom; Evelyn Lau, representing Best Canadian Poetry 2025; Zehra Naqvi (The Knot of My Tongue), sharing a multidimensional debut about the search for language and self; Michael Turner, documenting a life immersed in music (Playlist); shō yamagushiku, offering an expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair in shima; and Daniel Zomparelli, who uses wry humour to explore our lonely, scary, compelling lives in Jump Scare. Hosted by Aislinn Hunter.
Presented in partnership with KPU Creative Writing.
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STEPHEN COLLIS is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including two parts of a trilogy: A History of the Theories of Rain (2021), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and The Middle (2024), both published by Talonbooks. In 2025 Pamenar Press will publish Knock Down House.
JESS HOUSTY ('Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with the homelands, their extended family and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.
AISLINN HUNTER is an award-winning novelist, poet, and educator, and the author of eight books including the novel The Certainties (Knopf 2020). She lives on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
EVELYN LAU is a lifelong Vancouverite who has authored fourteen books, including nine volumes of poetry. Her memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (HarperCollins, 1989), published when she was eighteen, was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Evelyn’s prose books have been translated into a dozen languages; her poetry has received the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award, the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, and a National Magazine Award, as well as nominations for a BC Book Prize and the Governor-General’s Award. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including the Best Canadian Poetry series. From 2011-2014, Evelyn served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.
ZEHRA NAQVI is a Karachi-born writer raised on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC). She is the author of The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose. She is a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers awarded by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. She holds two MSc degrees from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
MICHAEL TURNER lives in the garrison town of Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. His books include Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer’s Poem and, more recently, 9×11 and Other Poems Like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven. His wartime journal mtwebsit.blogspot.com continues to cause him problems.
shō yamagushiku's work is grounded in a diasporic okinawan consciousness. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). His first poetry collection, entitled shima, reflects ancestors, violence, and tradition.
DANIEL ZOMPARELLI is the author of Davie Street Translations, and Rom Com co-written with Dina Del Bucchia. His collection Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the ReLit Short Fiction Award. He co-edited Queer Little Nightmares with David Ly. His latest book of poetry is Jump Scare.
