Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading featuring Wayde Compton

This free event takes place on Saturday, April 11th (Doors: 6:15 PM; Event: 7-9 PM) at SFU Harbour Centre (Room 1400). Enjoy readings, discussion, and light refreshments.

The Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading honours a Canadian poet(s) with a cash award and a celebration of their work. This event will occur each April and will be organized and administered by the Poetry in Canada Society, https://www.poetrycanada.org/.

A Governor General’s Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Phyllis Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten celebrated collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting.

As Stephen Scobie once wrote, the work of Phyllis Webb “has always been distinguished by the profundity of her insights, the depth of her emotional feeling, the delicacy and accuracy of her rhythms, the beauty and mysterious resonance of her images – and by her luminous intelligence.” It is this legacy that the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading seeks to honour, by selecting a poet who is distinguished by similar qualities.

In 2026, the fourth annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading honours poet Wayde Compton, who is the author of six books and the editor of two literary anthologies. His collection of short stories, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and his work has been a finalist for three other City of Vancouver Book Awards. He won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011 and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2000. In 2002, Compton co-founded the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project, an organization devoted to researching and promoting Vancouver's historical Black community and later helped establish the Hogan's Alley Working Group and the Hogan's Alley Society, its successor organizations. From 2006-2011 Compton co-published Commodore Books, Western Canada’s first Black Canadian literary press. He has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. Compton currently teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, and his latest book is Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics (U of Alberta P, 2024).

Important Information:

Venue and Accessibility: This in-person event takes place at the SFU Harbour Centre (Room 1400). It is easily accessible by transit and near SkyTrain. The campus is wheelchair accessible and has wheelchair accessible washrooms. Gender neutral washrooms are also available.

Please note: This event may be recorded and/or photographed. If you do not wish to be photographed, please inform the photographer.

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