Brad Cran is a writer and social entrepreneur who served as Vancouver’s second Poet Laureate. Cran’s book, Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (with Gillian Jerome), won the City of Vancouver Book Award, was long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature and has raised over $60,000 for marginalized people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

His legacy project as Poet Laureate was the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference in October 2011. This was a national gathering of a generation of poets who published their first book after 1990. The conference brought together 100 poets from across North America for a landmark exchange of ideas, poetry and poetics.

Photo credit: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward