Renée Sarojini Saklikar

POET LAUREATE FOR THE CITY OF SURREY, BC

Renée Sarojini Saklikar recently completed her term as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey, British Columbia. She lives in East Vancouver.

Her latest book is a B.C. bestseller: Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018) co-authored with Dr. Mark Winston.

Renée’s first book, children of air india, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) won the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for poetry. Renée co-edited The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press/SFU Public Square, 2015,) a City of Vancouver book award finalist. Her chapbook, After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees, (above/ground press, 2016), was a finalist for the 2017 bpNichol award. Renée’s poetry has been made into musical and visual installations, including the opera, air india [redacted].

Renée curates the popular poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU and serves on the boards of Event magazine, The Capilano Review, and the Bob Stewart Archives. She is a director for the board of the Surrey International Writers Conference. Renée belongs to the League of Canadian Poets and The Writer’s Union of Canada (TWUC) and is a member of the TWUC Equity Committee.

In 2019 Renée served as Writer in Residence for the Surrey English Teachers Association and was Guest Poet for Art Song Lab. Her creative productions included a new poetry chapbook, a poem-play about Canadian nurses in war time and a dance-poem installation with Vancouver dance artist, Salome Nieto and the adaptation of her bee poems into a musical composition by composer Owen Underhill, performed by Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble.

Renée was called to the BC Bar as a Barrister and Solicitor, served as a director for youth employment programs in the BC public service, and now teaches law and ethics for Simon Fraser University in addition to teaching creative writing at both SFU and Vancouver Community College. She is currently working on an epic-length sci-fi poem, THOT-J-BAP, that appears in journals, anthologies and chapbooks and is researching a self-help book about gender, culture, and fashion.