7:30pm doors / 8pm readings
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members 

Cecily Nicholson is a part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and manages school and public programs at the Surrey Art Gallery, on Semiamhoo, Kwantlen and Katzie territory. She is the author of Triage; From the Poplars, winner of the Dorothy Livesay BC Poetry Prize; and Wayside Sang, which won the Governor General's award for English language poetry in 2018.

"The strife between strife and its other has a content all its own in this fucked up world, where we have to live the unliveable. That dialectic is irreducible. The necessity of pleasure is irreducible especially when and because it seems obscene. Poetry is suppose to show that, even more than it’s supposed to remark upon that and Cecily Nicholson’s work does this at the highest level of intensity! 

Wayside Sang ’s wayward swing makes small, pulsing disunities of pulse like the muffled but still multiphonic heartbeat of the earth. The song of the earth, old and new, is sung at a place by the side of the road. Wayside’s social logic sang this then and now, on edge and over it, underneath and inside outskirts of the city where we stay and the commune that we follow."

– Fred Moten, author of A Poetics of the Undercommons

 Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.