Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

City of Victoria introduces two new poets laureate

Marie Metaphor Specht will serve as Victoria’s new poet laureate and Irena Datcu-Romano as Victoria’s youth poet laureate

The City of Victoria will celebrate the appointment of the city’s newest poets laureate with a reading by the two local poets at a city council meeting at Victoria City Hall on Thursday.

Selected by a nomination and peer evaluation process, Marie Metaphor Specht will serve as Victoria’s new poet laureate and Irena Datcu-Romano as Victoria’s youth poet laureate. The positions, which celebrate and reflect the life of Victoria through poetry, carry two-year terms.

The city’s poet laureate (or people’s poet) is an honorary position established in 2006, with the youth poet laureate position in 2013 — the first in Canada. The incumbents serve as local champions for poetry, language and the arts through public readings and civic engagements.

“We are delighted to welcome Marie and Irena to enrich and celebrate poetry in our community,” said Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto. “Our city has a storied literary history and we are proud to continue this tradition by amplifying their unique voices.”

Specht is a spoken word poet and multidisciplinary artist who regularly performs at a wide variety of venues, ranging from arts festivals to literary events and poetry slams. Her first full-length book of poetry, Soft Shelters, is due out this fall.

“Poetry is a way of reaching towards each other, of closing the spaces between us,” said Specht.

“I believe that creativity is our shared human birthright and any art form with an audience is a means to foster connections between people, an opportunity to see and hold each other in our complex histories of joy and suffering.

“This work is how we imagine a way forward, how we birth new worlds. Our communities flourish through intrepid acts of beauty, through the incredible power of stories shared.”

Datcu-Romano is of Romanian heritage and is in her second year of a double major at the University of Victoria. Her poetry has been published in Work in Progress magazine and Voices/Voix Poetry Journal. She is the poetry editor for This Side of West magazine.

“I am excited to serve as the youth poet laureate because I care about accessibility, collaboration, language reclamation and healing,” said Datcu-Romano.

“I have a large emotional and literary debt to the youth poetry ecosystem, namely the various workshops and student-run projects that accepted me and my writing. I want other youth poets to know they are each other’s greatest allies and collaborators.”

Specht and Datcu-Romano will produce new work and organize a community poetry event each year.

Along with sharing their literary talents with the community, they will also collaborate with other local poets.

The positions are made possible by a collaboration between the City of Victoria and the Greater Victoria Public Library.

For more information, go to victoria.ca/poetlaureate.

parrais@timescolonist.com