Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier Read "Jaws [tiburón]"

“Something in my name turns me into a fish under attack,” says Jaws: shark, worker, spectacle. This award-winning poetry collection collapses the distance between sea and office, aquarium and classroom, factory and vacation resort, resumé and body under attack. JAWS is a book about water, breath, and suffocation, about work that disciplines the body, about survival under glass.

Through (mis)translation, documentary fragments, and cinematic archive, these poems reveal how capital renders certain lives expendable, human and non-human alike. Fierce, darkly funny, and formally restless, JAWS insists on the shark not as monster, but as mirror ... swimming, working, alive and curious about where meaning breaks down across languages, worlds, and personas ... and what lurks in the waters between.

This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited). Tea and coffee will be served before the event.

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

Dora Prieto is a Mexican-Canadian poet, translator, educator, and community arts organizer. She is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she served as poetry editor of PRISM international, and she won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. Her work explores migration, embodiment, inheritance, language, and material culture through poetry, translation, textile, and collaborative arts practice. She is the co-founder of El Mashup Collective. Her first poetry collection is forthcoming from House of Anansi (2027), and her co-translation of JAWS [tiburón] was published by Cardboard House Press in May 2026. She is a tía, a dreamer, a thinker, and a cold ocean swimmer—despite a close encounter with a shark as a kid.

Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico ✿ city of eternal spring ✿ and raised in el Distrito Federal, Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier writes and translates from unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). Her work has appeared in PRISM international, Discorder Magazine, Volume, and carte blanche. She is part of eclectic artist collectives *mim* and El Mashup, festival coordinator and film programmer at the Vancouver Latin American Film Fest, and co-host of Vivaporú on CiTR 101.9FM. Foodie who shelves books and binds them too. Ocean child. She has felt the presence of a shark stirring nearby waters. Dani has two feisty gorgeous dachshunds, Xoco and Rol.