Poetry Bus! Celebrating the 29th Year of Poetry in Transit

In partnership with TransLink and BC Transit, Read Local BC presents the launch of this year’s Poetry In Transit campaign at Word Vancouver. Now celebrating its 29th year, this beloved community-engagement project displays the work of ten BC poets on public transit vehicles throughout the province. Join us to hear a selection of the featured 2025-26 poets read from their work, followed by a short discussion and Q&A in which you can engage with the poets over your love of the written verse!

READERS

HOST Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor whose award-winning books of poetry include Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and three chapbooks: Residence, WATCHER with Gary Barwin, and Trauma Head: the medical file. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Originally from Boston, she lives in Canada where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors. eleekg.com

Susan Alexander’s poems have appeared in Canadian and international anthologies and literary magazines, such as The Southern Review, Pangyrus, Arc and Grain. Her most recent publication is Berberitzen with Raven Chapbooks (2024). She is the author of two full collections, Nothing You Can Carry (2020) and The Dance Floor Tilts (2017) with Thistledown Press. Her poetry has won multiple awards, including the 2022 Vancouver’s City Poem Prize. She has hosted poetry readings and panels for the Federation of BC Writers and Victoria’s Festival of Writers. Susan lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people.

Jen Currin is the author of seven books, including Hider/Seeker: Stories, which was a finalist for a ReLit Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book, and The Inquisition Yours, which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award and was a Lambda finalist. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional territories of the Multnomah, Chinook, Clackamas, and other tribes, Currin lives in New Westminster, BC, on unceded Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, and Musqueam territories and teaches creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Junie Désil, born to Haitian immigrant parents in Montréal and raised in Winnipeg, has devoted over two decades to empowering communities made marginalized. An accomplished poet, her debut collection, eat salt | gaze at the ocean (2020), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and explores themes of Black sovereignty and the Haitian diaspora. Currently residing on the Traditional Territories of the Homalco, Tla’amin, and Klahoose, Junie mentors emerging writers at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. Beyond her professional life, Junie enjoys writing, coaching, consulting, and raising goats.

Joseph Kidney’s poems have been published in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Vallum, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Ex-Puritan, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (in Arabic translation), and more. He has won the Short Grain Contest, the Young Buck Poetry Prize, and Arc’s Poem of the Year. Devotional Forensics is his first full-length collection.

Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022).

Lauren Peat is a poet, translator, and teacher based in Vancouver, BC. Her poems, essays, and translations from French have appeared in a wide variety of journals and magazines, and her many collaborations with composers are featured in the repertoire of acclaimed vocal ensembles across North America. Her debut poetry chapbook, Future Tense, was published by Baseline Press in 2024.

Tom Wayman’s prolific literary career includes writing more than twenty poetry collections, three collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction and a novel, as well as editing six poetry anthologies. He received British Columbia’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the literary arts. In 2015, he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their daily employment. He won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards prize for fiction in 2016 (for the short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love) and for poetry in 2023 (for Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time). His memoir, The Road to Appledore (or How I Went Back to The Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place), was published in 2024. Wayman lives in Winlaw, BC, and his website is www.tomwayman.com.

Calvin Wharton has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., Wales, Sweden, and Denmark. He is a former chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College and writer in residence at the University of Wales. His books include a collection of short fiction, Three Songs by Hank Williams, and poetry collections The Song Collides, The Invention of Birds, and This Here Paradise.