Poets in the Round

On Thursday, April 25th at 6pm, join Massy Arts and Massy Books in welcoming Poets in the Round, in celebration of poetry month. Featured poets include: Jen Currin, Mercedes Eng, Marc Perez, Molly Cross-Blanchard, Brandon Wint, Rahat Kurd, and Melanie Noel.

Poets, seated in a semi-circle, will listen to other poets' poems and respond with their own poems in a kinetic conversation of ideas and inspiration.

This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.

Registration is free and required for entrance.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the poets:

Jen Currin's Hider/Seeker: Stories won a Canadian Independent Book Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. They have also published five collections of poetry, most recently Trinity Street. A white settler of mixed, mostly western European ancestry, Currin lives on unceded Qayqayt, Musqueam, Kwikwetlem, and Kwantlen Nation territories in New Westminster, BC and teaches creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Their second collection of short stories, Disembark, will be out from House of Anansi in May.

Mercedes Eng is the author of Mercenary English, a poem about sex work, violence, and community resistance in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, Pr*son Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and my yt mama. Her writing has appeared in the Lambda-nominated anthology Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Abolitionist, r/ally (No One Is Illegal), and Survaillance and M’aidez (Press Release).

Born and raised in Manila, Marc Perez lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Borderlands (Anstruther Press, 2020) and Dayo (Brick Books, 2024) is his first full-length poetry collection.

Molly Cross-Blanchard is a white and Métis writer and editor. Her collection of poetry, Exhibitionist, came out with Coach House Books in 2021, and she is currently working on a collection of short fiction about THW, aka Truly Horrible Women.

Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist, educator and multi-disciplinary storyteller based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon is ever-grateful for the power of poetry as a spiritual technology and social force. He is devoted to using poetry as a tool for refining his sense of justice, love, and intimacy. Brandon Wint's poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. His debut film, My Body Is A Poem/The World Makes With Me screened at DOXA documentary film festival in 2023.

Rahat Kurd is the daughter & granddaughter of Kashmiri women. She is currently at work on her second book of poetry, and has studied Urdu and Persian poetry for several years. Her work includes COSMOPHILIA (Talonbooks 2015), a collection of poems, and THE CITY THAT IS LEAVING FOREVER: KASHMIRI LETTERS (Talonbooks 2021) a hybrid book of correspondence and poetics co-authored with the Kashmiri poet Sumayya Syed.

Melanie Noel is the author of The Monarchs (Stockport Flats, 2013) and a ringing (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Lana Turner, La Norda Especialo, and GUEST. She lives in Seattle.

Event Venue

Massy Arts Society, 23 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Canada