Heidi Greco

Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a poet and lawyer who lives in Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her newest book is Bramah and The Beggar Boy, an epic fantasy in verse, (Nightwood Editions, 2021) about a time travelling locksmith, “brown, brave and beautiful” battling the evil Consortium on a planet ravaged by climate change. Renée Sarojini’s other books include the ground-breaking children of air india, about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize; and Listening to the Bees, winner of the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology. An instructor for SFU and VCC, she curated Vancouver’s first free Poetry Phone, 1-833-POEMS-4-U and curates the poetry reading series Lunch Poems at SFU. Renée Sarojini was the first poet laureate for the City of Surrey, (2015-2018).

Fred Wah lives in Vancouver and in the West Kootenays. Recent books include Sentenced to Light, his collaborations with visual artists, and is a door, a series of poems about hybridity. High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, is available online (http://highmuckamuck.ca/). Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991 (2015) was followed by a collaboration with Rita Wong, beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), see also http://www.riverrelations.ca/new-page/. A series of improvisations, Music at the Heart of Thinking, was published in 2020. 

LAIWAN is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in apartheid Rhodesia. Her book of poems TENDER: selected poems was published by Talonbooks in Spring 2020. In May 2021, she is honored to receive the Emily Award from Emily Carr University. Since the late 1980s, she has been investigating colonialism, with aim toward a decoloniality. Adding explorations into embodiment since 2000, she is intrigued by bodily and emotional ways of knowing, so as to unravel and engage presence. Recent public commissions have enabled her to focus on issues of urban development related to questions of environment and the built cityscape of Vancouver. Based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, she founded the OR Gallery in 1983 in Vancouver and teaches in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College, USA. www.laiwanette.net