Elee Kraljii Gardiner
Poet Laureate
Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a writer, editor, and creative mentor living in Vancouver. She is the author of 2 poetry books, Trauma Head, which investigates the experience of stroke, and serpentine loop, which considers gender and physicality through the idea of ice. She is also editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with John Asfour. For a decade she ran Thursdays Writing Collective, a beloved drop-in program for DTES residents that produced 10 anthologies.
She is a director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors, and is a co-founder, with Rachel Rose, of the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, a literary prize celebrating hybrid texts. She also runs The Whole Cloth reading series, an experiment in sustained listening where a poet reads an entire book of poems, with Bronwen Tate at University of British Columbia's Green College.
Elee holds an MA in Hispanic Literature from University of British Columbia and an MFA in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the recipient of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, Lina Chartrand Award for Social Justice and the Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. Her writing has been a finalist for the Souster Award twice, as well as the Kroetsch Award, bpNichol Chapbook Award, City of Vancouver Book Award, and in the US, the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and Montaigne Medal.
A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, visual and sound artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational art installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time.