Titilope Sonuga is an award-winning poet, writer, and performer who renders both in verse and in performance, a remarkable elegance of craft, a quality of rootedness and an unflinching womanhood that has made her an internationally celebrated artistic voice. She has graced stages across Canada and the globe and is the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration, performing an inaugural poem in May 2015.
She was a speaker at TedxEdmonton in 2014 and served as the 2015 - 2016 ambassador for Intel Corporation’s She Will Connect Program in Nigeria, advocating for women and girls in the STEM fields. She has published two collections of poetry, a spoken word album and had her work translated into Italian, German and Slovak. Her next collection, This Is How We Disappear, is forthcoming in 2019.
Ian Keteku is a poet, multi-media artist and educator. Keteku is also the 2010 World Poetry Slam Champion and is committed to using words as both an interpretation and cure for the human condition. He conducts poetry, writing and performance workshops for students of all ages, inspiring people to accept the power of their own voice.
C.R Avery
C.R Avery's writing flows like a Tennessee Williams stag play, from haiku-sized poems to longer erotic tales that sink the reader deeper into the backstage smoke of Avery's words.
C.R was born in Smith Falls, Ontario. He has released seventeen albums, written and directed three musicals that have been produced in New York, L.A, Seattle and San Francisco. Avery has toured ruthlessly throughout North America, Europe, and Australia with his rock & roll punk ensembles, hip-hop circus’s with 12-bar blues high kicks, and his infamous string quartets and burlesque revues. Some Birds Walk for the Hell of It is his third book of poetry. He presently resides in East Vancouver’s Little Italy neighbourhood.
cravery.com
Brendan McLeod is the author of a novel, The Convictions of Leonard McKinley, and five theatre shows. His music group The Fugitives have been nominated for multiple Canadian Folk Music and Western Canadian Music Awards, including Best Roots Group, Best Songwriter, and Best Vocal Group. He was the Poet of Honour at the 2012 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.
Brandon Wint
Brandon Wint is an Ontario born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joys, devastations and inequities associated with this era of human and ecological history. Increasingly, his work on the page and in performance casts a tender but robust attention toward the movements and impacts of colonial, capitalist logic, and how they might be undone. In this way, Brandon Wint is devoted to a poetics of world making, world altering and world breaking.
For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violent futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.
Brandonwint.com
Lucia Misch
Lucia Misch is a poet and performer from the Bay Area who lives and works on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people (colonially known as Vancouver).
Since getting her start as a young spoken word artist in California, she has brought her writing to stages across North America. In 2011 she placed second in the Canadian Individual Poetry Slam, and continues to share her work at events ranging from literary festivals to labour union conventions, from showcases in ornate theatres to house shows in someone's basement.
Her work has been anthologized in Alive At The Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2011) and published in print and online. Lucia's first collection of poetry will be released by Write Bloody North in the fall of 2019.
A veteran arts educator, Lucia is committed to helping others—especially youth—step into their creative, personal, and political power through writing. She facilitates spoken word workshops with WordPlay: Poetry In Schools, as an ArtStarts Poet in Residence, and a teaching artist at youth camps up and down the West Coast.
Luciamisch.com
RC Weslowski
RC Weslowski is the 2016 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Winner, the 2013 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Champion and a 2 time finalist at the World Cup of Poetry Slam in Paris, France. RC’s work has been published in CV2, Arc Poetry Magazine, Oratorealis and Quills. RC has also been anthologized in Red Reads First by Sargent Press, and The Nights Are Twice as Long by Goose Lane Editions. RC is a poet, a podcaster, a broadcaster and organizer of festivals and other events. RC’s first book “My Soft Response to the Wars: poems of resilience, survival, sacrilege and love” is being published by Write Bloody North in the Spring of 2021
