Mark your calendars for February 19-20th.  And prepare for a remarkable feast!

ARTWORK: Tasman Brewster, Out of This World (2015)

The Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium is a two-day interdisciplinary event at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU, Richmond campus) with over 25 invited speakers, including local and international academics, artists, curators, and writers, who will explore how Canadian writers and/or visual artists use food to articulate larger historical and cultural contexts.

The full schedule and list of participants can be found at the Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium homepage.

The symposium will coincide with the launch of the public art exhibition “Artful Fare: Conversations About Food” featuring the collaborative art projects of KPU Fine Arts and English students as they engage in creative-critical dialogues about Canadian poetry.

The artwork featured here — Tasman Brewster’s Out of This World (2015) — was inspired by Lorna Crozier’s poem “Jell-O” from The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things. Jell-O has a long history of being served at church basement dinners on the Canadian prairies, a fact Crozier knows first hand, having grown up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.  Yet Jell-O is no ordinary food.  Crozier delights in its mysterious origins: “Animal or vegetable? From the ground or the sea? Perhaps a Martian staple?” (60). In Crozier’s and Brewster’s hands, Canadian literary fare takes on sumptuous, otherworldly dimensions!

Featured at the symposium will be Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, who will present a Creative-Keynote on the topic of poetry inspired by food. Visual artist Sylvia Grace Borda will give a Creative Presentation on her art projects and their relationship to sustainable food systems and economies.

Space is limited, so we encourage you to Register

See you in February and spread the word!

Crozier, Lorna. The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2012.