Local Lines: A Celebration of Local Poetry

Name: Local Lines: A Celebration of Local Poetry
Start: 2026-04-22T19:00:00-03:00
Location: Gallery 78

Schedule

Wed, 22 Apr, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-03:00

Location

Gallery 78 | Fredericton, NB

Westminster Bookmark's annual poetry event, Local Lines, returns to Gallery 78 (796 Queen St.) on Wednesday, April 22nd at 7 pm.

This year's event features three local poets reading from new or recent collections: Thandiwe McCarthy (High Speed Connection), Jen Selk (Landmarks & Beacons) and Sue Sinclair (New-Fangled Rose), as well as an open mic! The evening will be hosted by poet and Westminster Bookmark bookseller Nick Thran.
Local Lines is free and open to the public. Books by the three featured readers will be for sale and the authors will be available for signing.

If you would like to read a poem during the open mic, please email [email protected] with the subject line "Local Lines Open Mic" and include your full name in the email.

We hope you will be able to join us for what should be a great night of poetry.
About the Poets:
THANDIWE MCCARTHY is a 7th-generation Black Canadian spoken word poet and writer. As culture correspondent for Maritime EDIT, he spotlights Black community leaders and artists.
Honored in 2023 as a CBC Atlantic Canadian Black Changemaker, he has also helped establish Emancipation Day on August 1st in New Brunswick.
His Canada Council-funded Still Here Initiative celebrates fifteen Black New Brunswick families and launches in July 2026 with a national exhibition at Beaverbrook Art Gallery and a book by Goose Lane Editions. You can find out more about his projects by going to thandiwemccarthy.ca
JEN SELK is a perpetually liminal mixed-race poc, an “invisible” member of the alphabet mafia, a wife and mother, and a late-diagnosed "ultra-high-masking" autistic writer residing on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik. A former journalist widely published in Canadian print media, Jen's creative work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Western Front, and the poetry collection Landmarks and Beacons. She sat for two years on the board of the Western Magazine Awards Foundation (since absorbed by the National Magazine Awards), has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and recently received an honourable mention from the League of Canadian Poets for Spoken Word.
SUE SINCLAIR (she/her) grew up in Newfoundland on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk. She is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including most recently Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems (Goose Lane Editions, 2022), winner of New Brunswick’s Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Heaven’s Thieves (Brick Books, 2016) won the Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Sue teaches creative writing at the University of New Brunswick on Wəlastəkwey territory, land of the “beautiful and bountiful river.”