Yvonne Blomer

Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir and served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015–2018. In her tenure as poet laureate, she brought poetry and the poets of Victoria to the forefront of city life. Through poetry she worked to raise awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology, her tenure culminating in the publication of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017) the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed with Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). As a community-minded poet and mentor, she was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth which came out of that series. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. With Death of Persephone: A Murder, she has turned her critical gaze to women and the women’s movement, the male gaze, and the faulty depictions of women in mythology.   

Books By Yvonne Blomer