MAR Talks Presents: For The Love of Words: Healing, Liberation, and Dreaming Anti-Racist Futures
MAR is deeply honoured to welcome Cecily Nicholson, acclaimed author, poet, and educator, for a powerful conversation on the love of words and the radical potential of literacy. Cecily invites us to reflect on how reading, writing, and storytelling have long served as anti-racist practices, tools that challenge erasure, confront injustice, and affirm the lived experiences of BIPOC communities.
Together, we’ll explore how literacy has offered generations a means of resistance, healing, and liberation, and how it continues to support the ongoing struggle for justice. We’ll consider how words can be wielded to disrupt racism in our institutions, in our relationships, and in how we imagine the future.
Ultimately, this event is an urgent invitation to see literacy not only as a practice of self-expression, but as a radical, anti-racist act.
Date: Saturday, January 18th, 2026
Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am
Introducing Cecily Nicholson
Cecily Nicholson volunteers with a community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. She is the author of five books of poetry and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her most recent work, Crowd Source, follows the diurnal movement of crows in Metro Vancouver. She is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC and the current Holloway Lecturer in Poetry in Practice at UC Berkeley.
MAR Talks Zoom Link / How to Join
Once registered, you will receive a confirmation email and reminder emails for the event. The Zoom link will be sent on the day of the event.
A recording of the event will be sent to attendees and may be made available on our social media channels at a later date.