Spoken Word and Storytelling at the Denman Hall

With Shane Koyczan and Alessandra Naccarato

Get Your Tickets Here

The Readers and Writers Festival invites you to attend a night of storytelling and spoken word performance that will not just entertain you but also crack open your heart, engage your mind, and rev you up with a sense of possibility.

Shane Koyczan started out as a street kid in East Vancouver and has since become an international spoken word sensation. He’s won championships at the National Poetry Slam and the Canadian Spoken Word Olympics. In 2012, he performed his poem “We Are More” at the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The video of his anti-bullying poem, “To This Day,” has garnered 24 million views and is used worldwide in classrooms as a teaching tool. He was awarded a BC Civil Liberties Award for the Arts in recognition of his social justice work.

Alessandra Naccarato’s work is lyrical, personal, and profoundly engaged with the complexities of ecological grief, climate crisis, and grassroots resilience. She is the recipient of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and the CBC Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Re-Origins of Species was awarded the AICW Bressani Literary Prize for Poetry and named a CBC Best Book of 2019. Her new book, Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene, addresses fundamental questions about our modern relationship to nature.

Doors open at 6:30, show starts at 7:00. Tickets are $15 in advance and can be purchased online at https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/spokenword or at Abraxas Books/ $18 at the door. No one will be turned away for lack of funds—free community tickets are available at Abraxas, on an honour system.

This show is co-presented by The Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival and Shakin’ Busheikin Productions, with collaboration from Abraxas Books.