The Fort Gallery has been given the great honour of hosting a poetry reading and book launch for our very own local poet, Susan McCaslin, April 6, 7-9pm. Her new book is Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne, on the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, which is a response to engagement with his works and life while living in Aix-en-Provence for three months in 2012.

Fort Gallery members have taken this opportunity to create a group exhibit of works
inspired by Cézanne to coincide with the poetry event. Works will encompass figure painting, still-life and landscape, all influenced by the style of Cézanne, but with con-temporary and locally thematic twists. Inspired by Cézanne runs April 5-23, 2017.

The opening reception and First Thursday poetry event will be held April 6, 7-9pm, and will also include a poetry performance by Toronto-based poet Penn Kemp. Penn is an activist poet, performer and playwright, the inaugural Poet Laureate for London On-tario and a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. Updates and poems are on https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/ and http://pennkemp.weebly.com/. She will be read-ing from new plays and Performing Women, as well as from Barbaric Cultural Prac-tices. Susan McCaslin is a Fort Langley poet who has published fourteen volumes of poetry, edited two poetry anthologies, and is an essayist and literary scholar. Her most recent volume is Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne (Quattro Books, 2016). Her selected Into the Open: Poems New and Selected (Inanna Publications, 2017) is forth-coming in October 2017. . Both Kemp and McCaslin are long-time friends who launched their recent titles together in Toronto this past fall.

Books for purchase and signing by the authors will be available.