Leanne Boschman is a Vancouver Island-based writer living and working on the traditional territories of the Cowichan Tribes and Malahat Nation. She began to love poetry during her first year on the planet, as her father recited the ballads of Robert W. Service. Too young to grasp “the strange things done in the midnight sun,” her ears delighted in rhythm and rhyme. Although those poems are often thought of as doggerel, Leanne remains a fan of whatever brings people to poetry.
Leanne has been an organizer and host for Pandora’s Collective, which runs a wide range of poetry events in Vancouver, BC. From 2021-2022, she was co-artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry, the longest running poetry-reading series in Canada. Having taught literature courses in both secondary and post-secondary institutions for over thirty years, Leanne is convinced that poets are archeologists of the human spirit and that we can all be part of the excavation, discovering artifacts together. She has witnessed how poetry is a light-weight portable life-saving device that can jolt hearts back to life. She loves hearing whatever has been lodged in the throat—thrush song, thunder, and thanksgiving.
Leanne’s poem Hymns for Sad Ballads won 1st prize in the 2022 Delta Literary Arts Society Poetry contest, and Most of Your Stuff is Worthless won 1st prize in Pulp Literature’s 2023 Kingfisher Poetry Contest. Her poetry has been published in Geist Magazine, Prism international, Other Voices, Dandelion Magazine, Room, Arc Poetry, The Tempz Review, Pulp Literature, and Grain, as well as in several anthologies. Leanne’s debut collection of poems, Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal (Leaf Press, 2009) explores colonial narratives of settlement and the lived experience of women in labour markets and domestic settings. Her second collection is Here at the Crux (Silver Bow Publishing, 2022). She also has a forthcoming chapbook and she is working on a collection of essays.
Hear Leanne during guest poet sessions at the Festival on Saturday and Sunday morning (12th & 13th).