National poetry month event presented in collaboration with the malahat review

Featured poets:

Neil Surkan is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Unbecoming and On High, and the chapbooks Die Workbook, Ruin, Their Queer Tenderness, and Super, Natural. A new collection, Empties, is forthcoming in 2026. He is the current Poet Laureate of Nanaimo, BC (2024-26).

Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living in Vancouver, B.C. and the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022), and a full-length collection, Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

Catherine St. Denis is the winner of The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Fiction. She placed in Grain’s Hybrid Forms contest, was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was twice shortlisted for PEN Canada's New Voices Award. Her work is featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

Eli Mushumanski is a writer who grew up on the unceded territories of the Sai’kuz people in Northern BC. They were the tenth Youth Poet Laureate for the City of Victoria in 2022. They have work published in The Malahat Review, Plenitude Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and elsewhere.

Hosted by Iain Higgins, editor of The Malahat Review