House of Anansi Poetry Bash, Ottawa

House of Anansi Poetry Bash featuring Brandi Bird, A.F. Moritz, and Graeme Bezanson

Join the Ottawa Writers Festival for an evening of poetry and conversation celebrating new titles from House of Anansi Press. This event will take place at 7:00pm, May 22, 2026, at the GCTC Studio, 1233 Wellington Street West, Ottawa. This is a special limited seating event. Please reserve your tickets here.

Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection, Pitiful , detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons.

A.F. Moritz’s twenty-third book of poems originated with an impulse, beginning in April 2019, to write a series of continuous poems. The first goal was to keep them short. The second was to make them separate, in the process reflecting the whole of human life, stable in moments and bodies. In  The Wren, Moritz arranges 70 short poems in a sort of galaxy: an apparent scatter, not of stars but of poems, of feeling-thoughts.

Graeme Bezanson’s debut collection,  Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity. These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson’s struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence.

Special thanks to our friends at the Great Canadian Theatre Company.

House of Anansi Poetry Bash
Featuring Brandi Bird, A.F. Moritz, and Graeme Bezanson
7:00pm, May 22, 2026
GCTC Studio
1233 Wellington Street West, Ottawa
Reserve your tickets here