Join us for the 44th Annual Harrison Festival of the Arts. We are excited to welcome everyone back to Harrison this year for a thrilling Festival! For full details on the festival such as Schedule, Artist Lineup, workshops, Children’s Day, the Artisan Market and more… continue on to the Hompage.
Literary Café
In Partnership with the Vancouver Poetry House
Location: Harrison Memorial Hall (290 Esplanade Ave.)
Time: Monday, July 10th, 8:30pm
The Harrison Festival is proud to produce this year’s installment of the literary Café with Vancouver-based not-for-profit, the Vancouver Poetry House and present three amazing writers as well as some musical accompaniment (TBD).
Vancouver Poetry House Description:
Vancouver Poetry House is the largest spoken word organization in Canada. VPH is dedicated to bringing poetry from diverse oral and literary traditions to Vancouver and British Columbia. VPH oversees three programs: Vancouver Poetry Slam, a weekly community stage with a headlining performer; WordPlay Poets, an outreach program that offers workshops and performances in schools and communities around BC; and Verses Festival of Words, Canada’s largest, annual spoken word festival. Two of our artists will be Johnny Trinh and RC Weslowski, the third is TBA. Johnny and I are four days away from the start of our festival and will not be able to answer any questions about July until the beginning of May.
Johnny D Trinh is an interdisciplinary, community-engaged artist whose practice includes: spoken word, theatre, music, movement, and creative technology with an emphasis on social media and online performance. Johnny is the founder of Stage to Page Performance Society. Johnny is interested in self as performance, and performance of self in relation to building community, especially when the community seems inaccessible. Johnny is also dedicated to the continual application and creation of consent-based, decolonizing, and trauma-informed practice when engaging with the community to create art. Johnny currently creates, works, resides, and is sustained on the traditional, unceded, ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. For more information visit: stagetopage.org
RC Weslowski is the 2021 Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award Winner, The 2016 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award Winner and a Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and Victoria Spoken Word Festival Poet of Honour. RC is a Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Champion, an Underground Indies Champion, A CFSW Team Champion, a Haiku Death Match and Nerd Poetry Slam Champion. RC co-hosts and produces Wax Poetic and Oh No Not Another Podcast podcasts. RC is the Artistic Director for Hullabaloo: The BC Youth Spoken Word Festival and curator for Mashed Poetics, a quarterly spoken word and music mash up event that has been running for over a decade. RC’s first book of poetry, “My Soft Response to the Wars” is out on Write Bloody North Publishing. www.writebloodynorth.ca
Tawahum Bige is a Łutselkʼe Dene, Plains Cree spoken word poet and hip-hop artist from unceded Musqueam, Squamish & Tsleil-Waututh Territory (CKA Vancouver). A Two Spirit, Nonbinary Scorpio-moon’s angst guides them to tell their most soul-rending truth to you, to self and to power with abundant love and reciprocity with the land. Their single, Connect2Spirit, charted #1 on Indigenous Music Countdown in June 2022. Having opened for Kimmortal and Vivek Shraya, Tawahum’s also performed for Talking Stick Festival for several years. They have a book of poems called Cut to Fortress! Find them online @Tawahum on streaming platforms, Instagram, Twitter, and more. His debut hip-hop album, Bottled Lightning, emerges May 5 th , so keep those ears keen!
