Misha Solomon Reads "My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet"

Two timelines intersect, weaving an alternate reality of queer ancestors, half-truths, domesticity, and desire. What if the queer ancestor you always wondered about had really existed—and could speak to you across all time? When there’s only one document to be found in the archive, can our misheard or half-remembered family stories be enough? My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is a daring, erotic, and humorous exploration of queer longing and Jewish possibility at the turn of two centuries. In a captivating series of narrative poems, Misha Solomon entwines an alternate memoir of his great-grandfather in pre-Holocaust Romania with a contemporary gay life in Montreal. With profound vision, voice, and craft, Solomon sets a new and powerful precedent for speculative poetic histories, allowing intimacy to find a way through memories real, imagined, and desired.

This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited).

Co-organized with UBC Creative Writing. Series Conveners: Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Poet Laureate of Vancouver; and Bronwen Tate, Creative Writing, UBC

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has appeared in journals across Canada and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, 2026, and 2027 (Biblioasis) and in On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House). He is a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. He is the author of three chapbooks: FLORALS (above/ground press 2020), Full Sentences (Turret House Press 2022), and Misha Solomon’s BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster (above/ground press 2026). His full-length debut, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, was released by Brick Books this spring.