The ninth annual Blueridge Chamber Music Festival is adding a new element to its music program: it's named its first poet in residence.

Vancouver-based Métis-Icelandic writer Carleigh Baker will take the inaugural post.

Her first story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017), won the City of Vancouver Book Award. It was also a finalist for the emerging Indigenous voices award for fiction. 

At the fest, which runs from August 8 to 19, Baker will read a new set of poems—her own modern spins on the poetry of the Austrian composer Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook (Italienisches Liederbuch), injecting contemporary themes from renoviction to mansplaining.

Her performances will accompany a rare complete performance of the Songbook, by renowned tenor Colin Balzer, soprano and Blueridge co-artistic director Dory Hayley, and New York-based Venezuelan pianist Manuel Laufer, with translations of Paul Heyse’s original poems projected above the stage.

The readings and concerts take place on on August 11 at Orpheum Annex and August 12 at Mount Seymour United Church as part of a program called About the Little Things. 

Find more info here.