On Thursday, September 8th at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, and poets Sarah Ens + Ellie Sawatzky, reading from their new poetry collections Flyway (2022, Turnstone Press) and None of This Belongs to Me (2021, Nightwood Editions).
At this in-person event, Sarah and Ellie will be joined by host and moderator Kevin Spenst for an evening celebrating poetry and the earth, and exploring Mennonite heritage and the various ways in which we find home.
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
This event is free + open to all of our community, and registration is mandatory.
Covid Protocols: For all in-person events, attendees must provide proof of vaccination, and use of mask at all times when at the gallery. We ask that if you are showing any symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
Click here to register for the event
Click here to purchase Flyway by Sarah Ens
Click here to purchase None of This Belongs to Me by Ellie Sawatzky
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Authors
Sarah Ens is a writer and editor based in Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, MB). Her writing has appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Poetry Is Dead, and Room Magazine, and in 2019, she won The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Her debut collection of poetry, The World Is Mostly Sky, was shortlisted for the 2021 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Flyway is her second book.
Ellie Sawatzky (@elliesawatzky) grew up in Kenora, Ontario. A past winner of CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize, runner up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize and Room’s Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award, her poetry and fiction have been published widely in literary magazines such as Grain, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Puritan, and PRISM. Her debut full-length poetry collection None of This Belongs to Me, featured in CBC Books, was published by Nightwood Editions in October 2021. She is currently an editor for FriesenPress, a member of the Growing Room Collective, and curator of the Instagram account IMPROMPTU (@impromptuprompts), a hub for prompts and literary inspiration. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and a cat named Camus.
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Host
Kevin Spenst, a Pushcart Poetry nominee, is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Upend (Frog Hollow Press) and a holm with the Alfred Gustav Press coming out at the end of 2022. In 2019, he was writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House. His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including Event, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds. He co-organizes the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes a chapbook column in subTerrain magazine, is an occasional co-host with RC Weslowski on Wax Poetic on Co-op Radio, teaches Creative Writing at Vancouver Community College and is the 2022 Poetry Mentor at SFU’s Writers Studio. He lives in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.