VANCOUVER AUTHOR-POET Kevin Spenst is kicking off a 50-venue cross-Canada reading tour called Chuffed about Chapbooks: a Poetry Tour of Everywhere on May 12. The event features Evelyn Lau and Joanne Arnott and takes place at THIS gallery.
He will be reading from his new chapbooks—A Video Tape Swaddled in Purple Wool and Recto-Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers—and from Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse.
Spenst, who teaches creative writing at Vancouver Community College and was the 2022 Poetry Mentor at SFU’s Writers Studio, is a Pushcart Poetry nominee and the author of Ignite and Jabbering with Bing Bong. He has also written a dozen other chapbooks, including Surrey Sonnets and Upend. In 2019, he was writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House.
For Chuffed about Chapbooks: a Poetry Tour of Everywhere, Spenst will do readings at art galleries and bookstores nationwide, such as Edmonton’s Paper Birch, Peryton Books in Saskatoon, and Toronto’s Flying Books. But that’s not all. He will also do a reading on a ferry in Kingston with poet laureate Sadiqa de Meijer and at various pop-up events and poetry crawls in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and London. He’ll also be participating in reading series in Toronto (the Art Bar), Guelph (artBar), and Montreal (the bilingual Accent reading series).
The tour is in support of three small books of Spenst’s poetry that came out along with Hearts Amok at the start of the pandemic.
