Penn Kemp and Susan McCaslin are featured at Spoken INK on Tuesday, Oct. 16th. Readings begin at 8:00 p.m. at the Burnaby Arts Council’s Deer Lake Gallery, 6584 Deer Lake Avenue. Open Mic will follow.

Poet, performer and playwright Penn Kemp reads from new books of poetry, Local Heroes (Insomniac), and Fox Haunts (Aeolus House). Penn has been lauded as a trailblazer since her first Coach House publication (1972), and a “one-woman literary industry” as London’s inaugural Poet Laureate and Western’s Writer-in-Residence. She was the League of Canadian Poets’ Spoken Word Artist, 2015. Two new plays followed her previous books, Barbaric Cultural Practice and Jack Layton: Art in Action. www.pennkemp.weebly.com.

Susan McCaslin, an established Canadian poet, has published fifteen volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Into the Open: Poems New and Selected (Inanna, Sept. 2017). Her Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011) was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Poetry Book Prize) and first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award. Susan resides in Fort Langley, BC, where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River. www.susanmccaslin.ca

There will also be a Burnaby Writers' Society workshop meeting at the gallery prior to the readings (6:15 – 7:45 p.m.). Feel free to attend one or both portions of these events.