Lunch Poems presents Daniel Cowper and Daniela Elza (In Person)

January’s Lunch Poems reading at SFU Harbour Centre’s Teck Gallery features poets Daniel Cowper and Daniela Elza.

Daniel Cowper’s poetry and essays have been published in various reviews in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, and the UK, and he is a contributing editor to New Verse Review. He is the author of Grotesque Tenderness, and The God of Doors, which won the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook Contest. His most recent book is Kingdom of the Clock, a novel in verse about the nature of urban life. Reviewers have called Kingdom of the Clock “an elegant, off-beat gem,” “gasp-inducingly beautiful” (MRB), and said its lines “chime with brilliance throughout” (BCR).

Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. Poems from Daniela’s sixth collection SCAR/CITY (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) were longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Her debut essay collection “Is This an Illness or an Accident?” (Caitlin Press, 2025) delves into the conflicts and contradictions of what it means to belong, to work, and find home. Her previous poetry books include the broken boat (2020), the weight of dew (2012), milk tooth bane bone (2013), the book of it (2011) and slow erosions (2020). Daniela was the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry and the 2010 Pandora’s Collective Citizenship Award. When she is not writing or volunteering in her community, she works as a creative writing instructor, editor and mentor on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver.