Multi-award-winning poet Canisia Lubrin introduced this event at last year’s Festival to great accolade; attendees called it “inspiring and beautiful”, “a pure joy”, and remarked that “Vancouver needs more events like this.” We’re thrilled to bring it back for a second year, featuring a new lineup of poets to shake and wake up your spirit: Jordan Abel, Gwen Aube, Camilla Gibb, Jess Housty, Shani Mootoo, and Lisa Robertson. Once again, Lubrin will bring her bag of thought-provoking questions, and each poet will read from their work and reflect on a secret question drawn from the bag on-stage and posed, one poet to the next, in a carousel-style reading and fireside-style chat. The result is a uniquely memorable and transformative event.
More information about the Festival:
Venue Map and Addresses | Box Office | Accessibility
Event Participants:
JORDAN ABEL is a queer Nisga'a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited, Injun, NISHGA, and Empty Spaces. Abel has won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Award and is a Professor at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.
GWEN AUBE is a working-class writer living in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, The New Orleans Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Expat Press, and Room Magazine.
CAMILLA GIBB is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels: Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life, Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, and The Relatives. She is also the author of the RBC Taylor Prize–shortlisted memoir This Is Happy. Gibb has received the Trillium Book Award and the City of Toronto Book Award and has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Victoria College, University of Toronto.
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. Housty lives with their family in the unceded ancestral territory in Bella Bella, BC.
CANISIA LUBRIN’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir, which won the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Lubrin’s work has also been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and others. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. She was the Guest Curator of the 2025 Vancouver Writers Fest.
SHANI MOOTOO is the multiple award-winning author of six novels, three poetry books, and one short story collection. Her latest novel is Starry Starry Night. Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and lives in Southern Ontario.
LISA ROBERTSON is a Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver. She was given the C. D. Wright Award for Poetry by the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2018, and her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
