VERS/E 4.1: Queer Poetry Open Mic with Renato Gandia

​VERS/E is back for our fourth season! Join us the first Wednesday of every month, September through April, at Felice Cafe.

Our inaugural event of the 2026-27 season will feature Renato Gandia!

​Doors & open mic sign-up at 6 pm, and poetry starts at 6:30 pm.

This event series is supported by the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers' Guild of Alberta.

ABOUT RENATO GANDIA
Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores faith, migration, memory, belonging, and queer identity. He is the winner of the 2026 Writers’ Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry, the 2025 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, and the 2026 War of the Words (poetry). His poems have been shortlisted in The Fiddlehead (2026) and The Malahat Review contests (2025).

​His work has appeared in Beyond the Concert Hall: An Anthology of Sound (Laberinto Press) Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Books), Yay! queer: Free and Queer (Inkd Publishing), The Leaves Still Fallow (Big Thinking Publishing), and other literary publications and anthologies.

​Renato is the author of the forthcoming memoir Unpriesting (Freehand Books) and the forthcoming poetry collection Eating Rice on Our Feet. He is the managing editor of Salingpusa and the acquisition editor of Constellations of Becoming: Queer Futures and Other Worlds, an anthology of speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

​He lives in Calgary and writes about the stories we inherit, the selves we abandon, and the people who teach us how to begin again.