Kyeren Regehr is Victoria’s current Poet Laureate for 2025 to 2026. This honorary position celebrates literature and poetry in the capital city.
An award-winning poet and writer, Regehr is the author of Cult Life (finalist for the national ReLit Awards and The Victoria Butler Book Prize) and Disassembling A Dancer (winner of the inaugural Raven Chapbooks contest). Her poetry has appeared in top literary journals and anthologies across Canada, Australia and the U.S., and she has won or been shortlisted for more than two dozen literary contests.
Beyond the page, Regehr’s background in professional dance and theatre gives her poetry an unmistakable rhythm. She once found herself in the finals of the Victoria Poetry Slam completely by accident after encouraging her students to perform. Now, as Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry, she continues to champion the literary arts.
“I’m honoured to serve as Victoria’s seventh Poet Laureate on lək̓ʷəŋən homelands and look forward to deepening our connection to poetry and one another,” said Regehr.
For more information about this program, or to contact the Poet Laureate, email culture@victoria.ca.
Past Poet Laureate Projects
Marie Metaphor Specht's 'Public Poetry Remix,' is an immersive art project produced with Monkey-C Interactive that has the Musical Railings art installation in the Yates Street Parkade animated by cut-up poems from seven poets, including the Poet Laureate and Youth Poet Laureate.
Musical Railings is installed on the five-story staircase on the south side of the Yates Street Parkade and transforms the staircase into a five-storey-tall musical instrument. Visitors can touch the sensors embedded in the railings to create sounds and play loops accompanied by sound-responsive LED lighting. Participants will be ‘cutting up’ the audio recordings of each of the selected poems by touching the sensors in the railings of the staircase. When they hold a sensor, one line from a recorded poem will play. They can touch the sensors in any order.
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Poet Laureate Marie Metaphor Specht's Poetry in Light project was a great success. It consisted of two poetry writing workshops and a performance inspired by and performed with Love Begets Love, an interactive, sculptural lighting installation inside the Greater Victoria Public Library's sxʷeŋxʷəŋ təŋəxʷ James Bay Branch in January 2024.
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Together, Gabrielle Odowichuck of Limbic Media and Marie Metaphor Specht aim to create dream-like spaces that inspire thoughtful contemplation and a sense of magic. Gabrielle is an artist-engineer developing sound-reactive lighting technologies to activate installations and performances. Marie is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, spoken word artist and the current Poet Laureate of Victoria. The combination of these skills and experiences has resulted in the deep exploration of light, form and visual metaphor. Their immersive installations are a physical manifestation of the conversations between these two creative minds and are a collaboration in the truest sense of the word.
Artist Statement
Love Begets Love is an immersive, sculptural light installation that uses gravity-defying forms and visual metaphors to whimsically describe the nature of loving human relationships. Love can be a lens that changes the very nature of how we see our world, just as a prism can break white light into the full spectrum of colour.
Love Begets Love's faceted heart lanterns use carefully engineered colour-changing light patterns to represent diverse networks of loving relationships. Coloured light travels through the prism heart-forms, just as love travels through a community. Love Begets Love is powered by Aurora software and can easily be switched from pre-programmed patterns to sound reactivity, allowing artists to perform with the installation and see their work translated live into responsive colourful lighting patterns.
Former Poet Laureates
Marie Metaphor Specht served as Victoria’s Poet Laureate from 2023 to 2025. Specht is a spoken word poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work has been published in Oratorealis, Untethered Magazine, The Chestnut Review, The Hellebore and Room Magazine among others. She regularly performs at a wide variety of venues ranging from arts festivals to literary events and poetry slams.
She brought poetry to life in incredible ways by leading workshops, curating interactive art installations and making poetry more accessible to our community. From Poetry in Light to Public Poetry Remix, her words have sparked connection and creativity across Victoria. Learn more
John is an established poet and editor and was the City's fifth Poet Laureate. His 26 books, chapbooks, and anthologies include The Malahat at Fifty: Canada's Iconic Literary Journal (2017), Polari (2014), For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (2012), and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (2007). Since 1980, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies on four continents have published his poems, essays, and reviews.
Yvonne Blomer was Victoria's fourth Poet Laureate from 2015-2018. Yvonne is an established poet, having published three collections of poetry and co-edited Poems from Planet Earth, an anthology from the Planet Earth Poetry reading series. Yvonne's work has twice been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and she has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry in English as well as in anthologies and literary journals in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne’s recent collection of poems is As if a Raven.
Janet Rogers served as Victoria's Poet Laureate for three years. Her term ended on November 30, 2014. As Victoria's third Poet Laureate, Janet created opportunities for the community to come together in celebration of poetic voices on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people. Janet is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and has been living on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people (Victoria, BC) since 1994. Janet works in the genres of poetry, spoken word performance poetry, video poetry and recorded poetry with music and script writing.
Local poet Linda Rogers served a three-year term as the City of Victoria's second Poet Laureate from December 1, 2008 to November 30, 2011. Linda Rogers is a poet, novelist, teacher and journalist who believes that celebration - the ritual integration of art, dance, music, and the spoken word - is essential to a community. Since most of her antecedents have been writers, lawyers or theologians, language is her natural medium.
Local poet, Carla Funk, was honoured to serve a two-and-a-half-year term as the City of Victoria's first Poet Laureate from June 2006 to November 30, 2008. During Carla Funk's term she participated in annual City of Victoria events and promoted poetry to Victoria neighbourhoods, schools and gathering places. Carla developed ideas to demonstrate that poetry is a primal, natural act - that it can heal, be funny, warm and moving, and accessible to the listener.
