Re-think, Return, Reverberate - 3 poets on writing toward Restor-volution

This event is free to attend. Any amount you can pay to support this event, helps to further Wordstorm's goal to make literary events like this accessible to everyone.

Join Wordstorm for an evening of poetry followed by discussion as Joanna Lilley, Rob Lewis, and Rita Wong share about how their writing and climate activism/awareness intersect and how they see writers being able to foster positive change.  

This is the second event in Wordstorm's  2023-24 core programming on the theme of Restor-volution, in which we ask how do we, as writers, move the  conversation to explore and evolve to rethink ways we relate to our planet and to each other that help restore harmony, balance, and move toward equity for all  species that share this world. Not a revolution, but a new stage of  evolution that honours the wisdom of generations who understood humanity  and nature are not separate or at war with each other.

Joanna Lilley is the author of Endlings, a collection of poems about extinct animals which won the Fred Kerner Book Award in 2021. She’s also the author of the poetry collections If There Were Roads and The Fleece Era, which was nominated for the Fred Cogswell Award, the novel Worry Stones, which was longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award, and the short story collection, The Birthday Books. Born in the south of England, Joanna lived in Wales and Scotland before moving to Canada in 2006. She loves sharing the joy of words and has given readings and workshops as far afield as Alaska and Iceland. She now lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she co-founded Yukon Words, and is grateful to reside on the Traditional Territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council. In 2021, she received Commissioner of Yukon’s Borealis Prize for literary contribution.

 Rob  Lewis, author of The Silence of Vanishing Things, and The Climate According to Life; Writings on the science, poetics and politics of the living climate (on Substack), is a poet, activist and house painter. His writings have been  published in Dark Mountain, Manzanita, The Atlanta Review, Southern  Review, Cascadia Daily, For the Love of Orcas Anthology and others. As owner of Earth Craft Painting he also works to revive the use of local wild clays to paint our work and living spaces.

Rita Wong is a writer, teacher, and waterkeeper. She is the  author of three books of poetry and the co-author of several  collaborative works, most recently, beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), with the poet Fred Wah. With Dorothy Christian (Secwepemc and Syilx Nations), Wong edited downstream: reimagining water (WLU Press, 2017). She is an associate professor of Critical + Cultural  Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she teaches  classes in the humanities and creative writing. Current, Climate (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2021) is an introduction to the environmental and social-justice poetry of Rita Wong. Selections from her poetic oeuvre show how Wong has responded to local and global inequities with outrage,  linguistic inventiveness, and sometimes humour.