Photo Credit: Ida Adamowicz

Kelsey is a writer, educator, performer, and graduate of the UBC Creative Writing Program. She has had her work featured on the East Van Poetry Salon’s Best Poems list, the CBC Non-Fiction Prize Long List, the Vancouver Fringe Festival, Nineteenquestions.com, and local anthology Stay Solid! A Radical Handbook for Youth. Kelsey was the 2015 – 2019 Writer-in-Residence for the Minerva Foundation’s Learning to Lead program.

Beginning her writing career with a two-year column for the South Delta Leader (now the Delta Optimist), Kelsey discovered spoken word poetry early on and instantly felt a kinship with the form. She was one of six poets chosen for the Cultch’s IGNITE! Spoken Word Mentorship Program. In the same year, she won a spot on one of Vancouver’s two Poetry Slam teams and began travelling B.C. with poetry group The Candelabra Collective, opening for such artists as Brendan McLeod and such events as the Campbell Bay Music Festival.  She is the author of four self-published chapbooks: Carnival Wire (2010), Carnival Dark (2011), Torches (2013), and twenty-three/thirty (2017).

A former Editorial Assistant for Prism International Magazine and Communications Coordinator for the Community Arts Council of Vancouver, Kelsey is a long-time host of Open Mic at the Lyceum, a monthly event at Christianne’s Lyceum of Literature and Art in which she strives to foster an inclusive space for artists of all disciplines and backgrounds. Kelsey has also worked in various roles for the Verses Festival of Words, supporting the growth of Vancouver’s largest alternative literary festival. Kelsey spent almost a decade with the Vancouver Poetry House’s WordPlay program, facilitating performance poetry workshops in high schools across the province.

She is now working on her debut novel.