The Single Onion celebrates National Poetry Month with an event featuring four great poets: Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Ian Fitzgerald, Jun-Long Lee, and Conner Levi.
Thursday, April 16, 2026
7:00 PM MT
Shelf Life Books
1302 4 St SW
Calgary
Streaming: www.youtube.com/@SingleOnionPoetry
About the Poets
Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of four books of poetry and non-fiction, most recently Stock (Coach House 2025). Her book of lyric essays, Micrographia, won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.
Ian FitzGerald spent 30 years as an advertising copywriter and creative director. Now, he teaches advertising at Alberta University of the Arts and writes poems stemming from ad slogans. His manuscript Each Mouthful Dripping in its own Rich, Creamy Goodness is awaiting publication. Performative readings of these poems share the liveliness of advertising and include props and audience participation (warning! you might get some on you).
Jun-long Lee is a poet, visual artist, and filmmaker. His poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, The Malahat Review, Grain, Riddle Fence, Conjunctions, Jubilat, and elsewhere. Abode is his first book. He is based in Calgary (Moh’kinstsis) on Treaty 7 lands. Abode is a debut collection of interconnected poems that delve with vertiginous momentum into homes—both material and interior—lost and rediscovered from the inside looking in: they are excavations of nested domestic spheres furnished with the bricolage of ruin and decay. Lee takes readers through hallucinatory geographies, plant-haunted spaces, and dreamlike corridors flooded with water and light, accompanied by an ever-changing subject that cannot make itself feel at home in its body, its country, or its language.
Conner Levi is an ex-national team ski jumper, Olympic alternate, U of C English Major alumni, and also studied acting at Capilano U in North Vancouver. He has published 2 collections of poetry under his publishing company Big River Publishing. His latest, Holes in the Sun, uses the “Proud to Pay” model which aims to provide artists a liveable wage by only printing a limited number of copies and selling them as a collectors item at a premium price. He also writes music and dedicates poems to his followers on social media: @ConnerLeviPoetry
About the Single Onion
Poetry and Performance – The Single Onion is Calgary’s longest-running poetry reading series, bringing Canada’s finest poets to our dedicated audience at Shelf Life Books. The Single Onion takes place the third Thursday of the month, nine times a year. Our event schedule can always be found at www.singleonion.com
We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets, the Calgary Arts Development, Inside Out Theatre, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, and Shelf Life Books.
