It’s a Pride mashup! For Vancouver Pride on August 1, Plenitude Magazine is pairing with the Vancouver Public Library for a literary reading and speed friending event!
At 7pm, hear local Plenitude contributors read their poetry and prose. Readers include Shaelin Bishop, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Catherine Lewis, David Ly, Jane Shi, Siavash Saadlou; Plenitude’s founder, Andrea Routley; and managing editor, Patrick Grace.
At 6pm prior to the reading, take part in Speed Friending! Are you looking to expand your circle of queer friends? Celebrate Pride all year round by bringing your favourite book, graphic novel, DVD, podcast, blog or zine to discuss at this fun, casual, in-person event. Lightning rounds of 6 minutes each will allow you to meet potential new friends and have interesting conversations.
Books will be for sale at the event, courtesy of Cross & Crows Books.
The event is FREE but registration is required: https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/6679c17649b0970ff48cba9e
This is an anti-oppressive, queer positive, scent-reduced and accessible safer space. Attendance will be capped at 80 people, so sign up early!
This event takes place at the Vancouver Public Library (central branch), 350 West Georgia Street, in the Alice MacKay Room, lower level. Take the stairs before you reach the main entrance and it’s the room right at the bottom of the stairs.
Shaelin Bishop (they/she) lives and writes on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh land. Their work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Ex-Puritan, The Common, Room, CAROUSEL, Plenitude, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Augur, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize.
Patrick Grace is a queer author from Vancouver. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Best Canadian Poetry, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire. His debut poetry collection, Deviant, was recently published with University of Alberta Press (click here to buy a copy). He moonlights as the managing editor of Plenitude Magazine. Follow him @thepoetpatrick.
Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as three poetry chapbooks, What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted as a graphic novel, One More Year.Chinese Canadian writer Catherine Lewis’s debut chapbook Zipless is a finalist for two Bisexual Book Awards. Longlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize, she is a graduate of SFU’s Writer’s Studio and a two-time Banff Centre Literary Arts alumna.
Chinese Canadian writer Catherine Lewis’s debut chapbook Zipless is a finalist for two Bisexual Book Awards. Longlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize, she is a graduate of SFU’s Writer’s Studio and a two-time Banff Centre Literary Arts alumna.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (2020) and Dream of Me as Water (2022), both published under the Anstruther Books imprint of Palimpsest Press, and short-listed for the 2021 and 2023 ReLit Poetry Awards, respectively. He is also co-editor (with Daniel Zomparelli) of Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022).
Andrea Routley is an author and screenwriter based in Vancouver. Her first book, Jane and the Whales, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction, and the title story of her second book, This Unlikely Soil, was a finalist for The Malahat Review Novella Prize. She was the 2022/23 Haig-Brown House Writer-in-Residence, where she completed work on her third book, a novel entitled Field Guide to Bats & Other Damage. She writes mostly fiction about queer females and their relationships within their human and non-human ecologies on the rural West Coast. She has no pets, but one pigeon in particular seems pretty comfortable on her balcony.
Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has been noted in the Best American Essays series. His short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Malahat Review, Plenitude Magazine, and Southeast Review, among many other journals. He is the winner of the 2024 Susan Atefat Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.
Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. She is the winner of The Capilano Review’s 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest and author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) is her debut poetry collection. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.
