Guest Poet, Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor and the seventh poet laureate of Vancouver. Her legacy project Here, Hearing is a community sound-based initiative. She is the author of two poetry books, Trauma Head (Anvil Press, 2018) and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016) and editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Anvil Press, 2019) and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012) with John Asfour. Elee codirects the Whole Cloth reading series, an experience in sustained listening for which an author reads their entire collection, with Bronwen Tate at University of British Columbia. Elee's third poetry collection, sometimes, forest is forthcoming from Talonbooks in spring 2026. Originally from Boston, Elee lives on unceded Musqueam land where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, an online international program pairing authors with mentors.

A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, sound and visual artists, Elee is creating a sonic version of the poetry collection Trauma Head with Eduardo Abrantes for Siren Recordings. Throughout 2025-26 Elee is collaborating with Zeitschleife, an Austrian arts collective using her texts in conjunction with motion capture and figure skating to create sound compositions. She is also working with Giorgio Magnanensi (Vancouver New Music) and cellist Marina Hasselberg on a site-specific poetry and sound installation using cedar resonators to be performed in the forest near Vancouver. Her recordings for “Lone Woman in the Forest”, an installation by Clare Archibald in the Galloway Forest in Scotland in 2021 will be remounted in Trujillo, Peru in November 2025.