The City of Vancouver, in partnership with the Vancouver Public Library and the Vancouver International Writers Festival, is proud to announce celebrated local poet and author Evelyn Lau as Vancouver’s third Poet Laureate.
Mayor Gregor Robertson will welcome Evelyn Lau as Vancouver’s third Poet Laureate at a ceremony on Saturday October 22 at 5 p.m. at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 W. Hastings St). This free event will close the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference (October 19-22) organized by Brad Cran, Vancouver’s outgoing Poet Laureate.
Ms. Lau plans to raise the profile of local poets and bring poetry into public spaces and public discourse, continuing the work of her predecessor. She will also meet with aspiring poets in the community through a series of poet-in-residence consultations and continue to work on her sixth collection of poetry.
Evelyn Lau was born in Vancouver in 1971 and is the author of five volumes of poetry, two works of non-fiction, two short story collections and a novel, with works translated into a dozen languages worldwide.
Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, published when she was 18, was a Canadian bestseller and was made into a movie. You Are Not Who You Claim won the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award, and Oedipal Dreams was nominated for the Governor-General’s Award for poetry. Her poems have been included in Best American Poetry and Best Canadian Poetry and received a National Magazine Award. Her most recent collection, Living Under Plastic, won the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a woman in Canada.
The Poet Laureate is an honorary position established by Vancouver City Council to celebrate literature and poetry in Vancouver. The position is funded by a generous endowment established by Dr. Yosef Wosk, OBC. During a three-year term, the Poet Laureate champions poetry, language and the arts.
Registration for the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference is open to the public and available at the V125PC website.
Details on the Poet Laureate designation can be found at City of Vancouver website. To attend the October 22 event, please RSVP to jonathan.taylor@vancouver.ca by October 18, 2011.
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