Dear Friends &: Francesca Bennett, Yoon Sook Cha, Zoe Imani Sharpe
- Francesca Bennett
- Yoon Sook Cha
- Zoe Imani Sharpe
Western Front and The Capilano Review are pleased to announce the return of our monthly reading series Dear Friends &. Please join us for an evening of poetry by Francesca Bennett, Yoon Sook Cha, and Zoe Imani Sharpe. The evening will be hosted by Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross and Kiel Torres.
In addition to showcasing the work of local and touring Canadian authors, we’re also delighted to welcome Jonathan Alfaro as the feature artist for the season. His recent work exploring relationships between drawing and writing, porousness and legibility, will provide an atmospheric backdrop for each reading event.
The series’ name draws inspiration from the salutations and sign-offs used by Roy Kiyooka in his Transcanada Letters (Talonbooks, 1975), a collection which details the comings and goings of his literary sociality across Canada, the network of people and relations that enfold his writing, and the longings of his “Heart’s Geography” to be near the ones he loved. Kiyooka was an important figure for both Western Front and The Capilano Review, and this series invites his spirit of kinship, connection, and conviviality into the reading space.
About the Artists
Francesca Bennett is a writer based in Vancouver. She is co-host, with Ratna Dhaliwal, of sleep and her brother death, a twice-monthly bootleg screening series from bed, and she is working on OHCE-ECHO, a fifty-five-square-foot project space at 1469 Venables. Her text about Woojae Kim’s exhibition at dreams comma delta was the recipient of the 2023 C New Critics Award.
Yoon Sook Cha is a writer and photographer working on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. She received her PhD from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program for Structured Liberal Education at Stanford University and an artist at the Winter Writers Residency 2023 at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her published work includes Decreation and the Ethical Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other (2017). She is currently working on “Grief Cycles I, II, III,” a hybrid text and installation that utilizes poetry, sound installation, and photography to inscribe and reiterate subjects of grief at the site of their erasure.
Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet, editor, teacher and workshop-maker based in Toronto, Canada. Her writing embraces desire and intuition, the sensuality of aesthetics, lineage, loss and mourning, women’s labour and practices of vitality. Her recent collaborations include an exploration of “life writing” called Bout That Life, a workshop gathering disparate citational materials; WhAt She SAid: Promiscuous References & Disobedient Care, and the intersubjective text Power, Baby! with Claire Freeman-Fawcett. She was the 2023 poet-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and her work has been published by YYZ Artists’ Outlet, carte blanche, and Best Canadian Poetry.
Accessibility
The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of 26 stairs. While plans for a full building upgrade to facilitate access for wheelchair and scooter users are still underway, events in the Grand Luxe Hall are made available virtually via high-quality livestream with CART caption (see link above). Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Produced in partnership with The Capilano Review and with support from the BC Arts Council.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.