Real Vancouver 2022 End of Year Party
Sunday
November 27
4 PM PT | 7 PM ET
Register today to join us LIVE on Crowdcast!
Readings by
Chelene Knight
Saeed Teebi
Emily Riddle
Harrison Mooney
Phoebe Tsang
Jamella Hagen
Hosted by
Dina Del Bucchia
Sean Cranbury
Sponsored by
BC Arts Council
Canada Council for the Arts
Poster Design
The Readers
Chelene Knight
Chelene Knight is the author of the Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award, and long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature.
Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals, plus the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, and the Toronto Star.
Her work is anthologized in Making Room, Love Me True, Sustenance, The Summer Book, and Black Writers Matter, winner of the 2020 Saskatchewan Book Award.
Her poem, “Welwitschia” won the 2020 CV2 Editor's Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM's 2021 short forms contest.
Chelene's new novel Junie, is available with Book*hug Press now, and her book on Black self-love and joy is forthcoming with HarperCollins Canada in 2023.
Knight was the previous managing editor at Room magazine, and the previous festival director for the Growing Room Festival in Vancouver.
She has also worked as a professor of poetry at the University of Toronto. Chelene is now founder of her own literary studio,
Breathing Space Creative through which she’s launched The Forever Writers Club, a membership for writers focused on creative sustainability.
Chelene works as a literary agent with the Transatlantic Agency.
Saeed Teebi
Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer.
His story “Her First Palestinian” was shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. Teebi’s collection by the same name is his first book and was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize in 2022.
He was born to Palestinian parents in Kuwait and, after spending time in Connecticut and California, has lived in Canada since 1993.
Teebi now lives in Toronto.
Writers Trust Jury Citation: “Sometimes a writer comes along whose stories are not only complex and full and exquisitely written, but whose vision and political voice feels necessary. In Her First Palestinian, Saeed Teebi coaxes the reader in a certain direction, and then flips the narrative so that now we are complicit, and we see our own guilt in the great divide that exists between the privileged and the stranger. Teebi does this with subtle humour and a wry tone. He does not preach, yet his writing expresses a certain fervour that is essential. He is a vital voice.”
Emily Riddle
Emily Riddle is Nehiyaw and a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw) in Treaty 6.
She lives in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). A public library worker, researcher, and writer, her work has been published in The Globe and Mail, Teen Vogue, Room Magazine, and PRISM International.
In 2020, Emily was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.
She was selected for the 2021 Writers’ Trust Mentorship by poet Joshua Whitehead. Her first chapbook is forthcoming in 2021 with Moon Jelly House.
“Emily Riddle is a widely read poet and thinker, positioning herself alongside fellow nêhiyâw storytellers like Billy-Ray Belcourt, Dallas Hunt, and Randy Lundy. I was immediately brought home into the roaming prairies, the vastness of our river systems, the breadth of kin we are in relations with upon opening of her manuscript. Riddle’s poetics are timely and relevant, literary and literal, political and embodied. She animates the land as a being too, allowing it to speak, and never forgoes its desires. She posits herself within the broadening poetic arena of Indigenous biotexts and I am so honoured to be walking hand-in-hand with her throughout this editorial process. I cannot imagine a more serendipitous pairing!”
— 2021 WT Poetry Mentor Joshua Whitehead
Harrison Mooney
HARRISON MOONEY is a writer and journalist. Born to a West African immigrant mother, he was adopted as an infant by a white family and raised in the Bible belt of British Columbia.
He has worked for the Vancouver Sun for nearly a decade as a reporter, an editor and a columnist.
His writing has also appeared in the National Post, the Guardian, Yahoo and Maclean’s. Harrison Mooney lives in East Vancouver with his family.
Phoebe Tsang
Phoebe Tsang is a Hong Kong-born Chinese, British, and Canadian poet, author, librettist, and playwright who makes her home in Toronto.
She has published a poetry collection, Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse (Tightrope Books, 2009), and her short stories have appeared in Geist, Broken Pencil Magazine, Litro Magazine, Rivet Journal, Asia Literary Review, The Bombay Review, and other places.
Her writing is informed by lyricism and rhythmic sense, inherited from her background as a professional classical violinist.
Setting Fire to Water is her debut collection of stories.
Jamella Hagen
Jamella Hagen grew up in Hazelton, BC and has lived in Vancouver, Brazil and South Korea.
Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada including Arc, Event and The Malahat Review as well as in the anthologies Unfurled: Collected Poetry from Northern BC Women, Ice Floe: New and Selected Poems and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2010.
Her work has won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, placed third in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt and been shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award.
She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from UBC, is a former executive editor of PRISM international and has coordinated the Whitehorse Poetry Festival.
She currently lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, and is an instructor at Yukon College.
About Real Vancouver
Real Vancouver Writers’ Series is a non-profit society based in British Columbia, Canada, that is dedicated to curating, producing, and promoting four literary events per year featuring emerging and established writers from Vancouver and across Canada.
It is our great privilege to do this work on the ancient and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Gratitude to the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the literary community, and our team of dedicated volunteers for their continued support.
Real Vancouver Quarterly | RVQ+
Send Us Your Pitches
Real Vancouver is a curated, inclusive, and independent literary reading series. We do our best to stay in touch with writers from across genres, platforms, styles, and approaches as we can but it’s not possible for us to know about what everybody is doing all the time.
We encourage writers and publishers to send us info about new and exciting work by writers that you feel would fit with the RVWS vibe.
Emerging writers, regardless of age, if you’ve had something published in the journals or reputable online mags, let us know!
Publicists, marketing team members, heck even the authors themselves, if you’ve got a book coming out that you think we should know about, then please holler at us.