Spring Poetry Tour

Join touring Vancouver poets, Rob Taylor, Kevin Spenst, and Dallas Hunt to celebrate their new collections of poetry, with local readers Cole Mash and Matt Rader.

Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, and the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territory of the Kwikwetlem and Tsleil-waututh peoples, and teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of the Fraser Valley. His new book, Weather, was published in April by Gaspereau Press.

Kevin Spenst is the author of four full-length books of poetry along with sixteen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Recto Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers (co-written with Joshua Pitre for Collusion Books) and Hymned Data (Pinhole Poetry.) He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi in Northern Alberta. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, was published in 2018 and was nominated for several awards. Creeland, his first poetry collection that was published in 2022, was also nominated for numerous awards. He currently lives in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia.

Cole Mash (he/him) is a poet, scholar, writer, teacher and community arts organizer who lives on unceded Syilx-Okanagan territory in Kelowna, BC. He has performed poetry locally and nationally for over 10 years, and his creative work has been published in CV2, Pinhole Poetry, Forget Magazine, The Eunoia Review, and anthologized in The Quiet Minds Anthology and Pinhole Poetry’s Volume 2 Selected. His lyric-memoir, What You Did is All it Ever Means, was published with Broke Press in 2021.

Matt Rader’s most recent collection of poems is Fine (Nightwood 2024). He teaches Creative Writing at UBC Okanagan.