Shane Koyczan and Alessandra Naccarato
Live on Denman Island
April 4 - Doors Open at 6:30pm, Show Starts at 7pm.
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 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. Winner of the Individual Champion title at the National Poetry Slam and the Canadian Spoken Word Olympics, Koyczan performed his poem “We Are More” at the opening ceremony of the 2010 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.
Here’s what people are saying about Shane:
“A symbol of hope …Canada’s best known spoken word poet.”— CBC The National
“Unapologetically taps emotion: the deep, real feelings we aren’t generally encouraged to express in public”— VUE Weekly
“A beacon of hope and change.”— The Georgia Straight
Alessandra Naccarato has won multiple awards for her poetry and gained critical acclaim for her recent book of essays. Her work is lyrical, personal, and profoundly engaged with the complexities of ecological grief, climate crisis, and grassroots resilience.
Born and raised in Tkaronto (Toronto), she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her debut poetry collection, Re-Origins of Species was awarded the AICW Bressani Literary Prize for Poetry, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and named a Best Book of 2019 by CBC Books. She is the recipient of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and the CBC Poetry Prize.
Her new book, Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene, addresses fundamental questions about our modern relationship to nature amid depictions of landscapes undergoing dramatic transformation, taking us through history and across continents. Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life, describes it as: “A book so unique it feels like a genre unto itself—an inquest, a love letter, a dirge, an electrifying epic, a timely tincture, a heart-stopping memoir of stones.”
These two friends will share the stage, delivering performances of their work and talking about the being a writer today and other topics.
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.
