Renée Sarojini Saklikar

Limited term: Spring 2023, Fall 2023-Summer 2024

Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a writer and lawyer who lives in Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, and she is the author of four books, including the ground-breaking poetry book, children of air india, about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize; and is the co-author, with Dr. Mark Winston, of the poetry and essay collection, Listening to the Bees, winner of the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology. Her work has been adapted for visual art, dance, and opera, including air india [redacted] with SFU Woodward’s, the Irish Arts Council, and Turning Point Ensemble. (premiered 2015: https://tomcreed.org/portfolio/air-india-redacted/ ). She was the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey (2015-2018), and she teaches creative writing as well as law and ethics for writer and editors. Renée Sarojini curates Lunch Poems at SFU (https://www.sfu.ca/continuing-studies/events/lunch-poems.html) and the Vancouver Poetry Phone (https://www.dtvan.ca/what-we-do/placemaking-and-public-spaces/poetryphone/); and is a member of Meet The Presses (https://meetthepresses.wordpress.com/ poetry chapbooks and micro presses). She also serves on the advisory boards of Event magazine, The Ormsby Review as well as serving as a board director for the Surrey International Writers Conference (https://www.siwc.ca/). Renée Sarojini works the epic, reclaiming it for climate justice and female heroes in her long poem project, THOT J BAP, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns, an epic fantasy in verse. The first book in this series is Bramah and The Beggar Boy, (Nightwood Editions, 2021). For more information on this epic series as well as a statement of poetics, please visit https://thotjbap.com/