Vancouver's Poet Laureate

The Poet Laureate, ‘the people’s poet,’ is an honorary position with a flexible term of two to three years. During that term, the Laureate will act as a champion for poetry, language and the arts, create a unique literary project and represent the City as Laureate during readings at civic functions and public poetry events.

The position is funded by a generous endowment established by Dr. Yosef Wosk, OBC, in 2006.

Call for Submissions: 2025 Poet Laureate

The City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Public Library, and the Vancouver Writers Fest are accepting submissions from published and performance poets for Vancouver’s next poet laureate.

The laureate will start in January 2025 for a 2 or 3-year term. The announcement of the new laureate will take place at the Vancouver Book Award event in October 2024.

Deadline for applications is June 26, 2024

For more details and to submit your application follow the instructions HERE.

City Poems Project

Fiona Tinwei Lam’s four-stage City Poems Project has involved community outreach to encourage the generation of new poems and poetry videos to foster greater understanding about significant historical, cultural and ecological sites on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples now known as the City of Vancouver.

Stage One: a Poetry Contest for youth and adults to write poems about historical, cultural or ecological sites within the city (January-June 2022)
Stage Two: a Poetry Video Contest for selected post-secondary classes based on the prior year’s award-winning poems and a few other curated site-based poems (January-June 2023)
Stage Three: development of a geolocated app in collaboration with UBC’s CEDaR team to enable the public to access audio-recordings of the site-based poems from Stages One and Two (2023-24)
Stage Four: a writing retreat stage for the poet laureate to generate her own Vancouver-based poems (2023-2024)

Here are the exciting results of the innovative, collaborative City Poems Project initiated by Vancouver’s sixth poet laureate to stimulate public engagement in poetry about local, historical, cultural and ecological sites within the unceded, ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples that we now know as Vancouver.

Winning poems from the city-wide contest are showcased, along with site-based poems from well-known local published poets. Read about the award-winning videos made by student teams based on these poems. Find out about promising next steps, including the development of a geolocative app.

The publication includes links to the VPL YouTube Channel with the 44 poetry videos, and other additional resources about Vancouver poetry and local history, as well as a special resource for teachers with links to specific poems and poetry videos about diverse sites.

City Poems is a launching pad for future collaborations, integrating the distilled language of poetry and the visual impact of film and video.

Additional Resources

Check out Fiona's blog for helpful resources and to stay up to date.

The blog contains her Guide for Local Poets as well as a list of Vancouver-based and Vancouver-themed poems.

Current Poet Laureate

Fiona Tinwei Lam

2022 — 2024 Poet Laureate

Author of three poetry books and a children's book, Fiona Tinwei Lam’s work also appears in over 40 anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry (2010, 2017 anniversary edition, and 2020). Her work has won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford prize and been shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award and has been thrice selected for BC’s Poetry in Transit.

She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer, and has co-edited the nonfiction anthology, Double Lives, with Cathy Stonehouse and Shannon Cowan, and the nonfiction and poetry anthology, Love Me True, with Jane Silcott. Her award-winning poetry videos done in collaboration with filmmakers have screened at festivals locally and internationally.

A former lawyer, Fiona obtained an MFA in creative writing from UBC and presently teaches at SFU Continuing Studies.

Fiona Tinwei Lam's Website
Email: vancouverpoetlaureate6@gmail.com | Vancouver's Poet Laureate website