The Vancouver Poetry Slam is back Live! On November 18th come to C-lab at The Cultch to see the Live Legends Slam! Our 4 legendary slam icons: RC Weslowski, Magpie Ulysses, Johnny MacRae & Johnny Trinh will take on 4 challengers in a head to head slam battle. Along with this awesome slam battle another slam icon, Brandon Wint will dazzle and soothe you with his word wizardry as our feature performer.
There are only 60 tickets available event so go to https://vancouverpoetryhouse.eventbrite.ca/ to grab yours quick before they sell out!
Brandon Wint is an Ontario born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy and devastation and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violence futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.
Johnny D Trinh, is an interdisciplinary, community-engaged artist focused in spoken word, theatre, and creative technology. Johnny is founder, and artistic producer of Stage to Page Performance Society, and is based on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Selected highlights: TedX Bearcreek Park, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts: Fever Rising, Naked Heart Festival; BC Ministry of Tourism, Arts & Culture: Multiculturalism Awards, Banff Centre: Spoken Word Program Alumni, Verses Festival of Words. “It takes a community to build an artist… whether we are nurtured by it, or resist against it.”
Writer, Rabble Rouser, fancy talker; Magpie Ulysses began performing at the age of 17 to save her life. She has performed across North America and is a veteran of the national poetry slam community in Canada where she was a member of two national champion Vancouver poetry slam teams. She was named a Poet of Honour at the Canadian festival Of Spoken Word in the Fall of 2012. A bit of a witch, a nature freak and an activist at heart, Magpie is known for her visceral, often surrealist writings that extend from the everyday human experience into the depths of natural and inanimate worlds. Magpie has spent much of the past decade heavily involved in the arts while living in and around rural BC and Southern Ontario. Having spent the past few years raising a new human and past many years caring for her grandmother through Alzheimer’s disease, she has become increasingly interested in questions surrounding genetic memory, place, body, grief, aging and how we choose to tell our own stories.
Johnny MacRae is a mouthy poet and barefoot beard. Beloved of angry cats everywhere, MacRae’s poems hit like fuzzy paws with bloody retractable claws. He has toured widely as a featured artist at poetry series as well as poetry, music and arts festivals, leaving mountains of slain rats in his wake. Victoria Spoken Word Festivals’ 2013 Poet of Honor, MacRae asks you to open your doors long enough for him to decide whether he wants to stay inside, or go outside, or stay inside. His poems have been described as “so energetic, it’s no wonder he sleeps 18 hours a day.”
RC Weslowski is the 2021 Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award Winner and The 2016 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award Winner. He’s been co host the radio program Wax Poetic on Co Op Radio for 20 years and is the Artistic Director for Hullabaloo: The BC Youth Spoken Word Festival RC’s first collection of poetry “My Soft Response to the Wars” is available now from Write Bloody North Publishing www.writebloodynorth.ca