Tina Biello
Featured Writer
Tina Biello is Italian by way of Lake Cowichan, BC. She is born to immigrant parents from Southern Italy and currently lives on the traditional territory of the Snaw-naw-as people. She is an actor, poet and playwright and had the great privilege of working with mentor Patrick Lane from 2008-2019. Tina lived in the Yukon back when she was finding her feet as a writer. Since then she has 4 books of poetry published. Her first book of poetry, In the Bone Cracks of the Walls, with Leaf Press, are stories of her ancestral village in Italy and her most recent work with Caitlin Press, The Weight of Survival, looks at themes of coming from two places. She loves to collaborate and has worked with composers, singers, painters, and dancers. She was the Poet Laureate of Nanaimo from 2017-2020 and has been recently collaborating with the Vancouver Island Symphony with new symphonic works set to her poetry. Her current writing project is a screenplay based on a true story of a young lesbian in rural Alberta in the 1960’s who is caught kissing her girlfriend and what happens to her. You can find her on Instagram @biellotina, Facebook @tinabiello or at www.tinabiello.com
Events
Workshop - Writing and Sharing your Story
We all have stories to share. We can put them down on paper beautifully, but if we get up to read them and choke on the words, the audience won’t know what brilliance they are hearing.
This workshop will focus on writing prompts for the first half. Prompts that will take us to stories that are close to our hearts. The second half will look at sharing those stories with our audience by reading them aloud, be they poems or prose. Please bring something you’d like to read aloud that’s already written or if you’re brave, you can read what we work on in our time together. In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore what makes a good reading and how to share your story.
This workshop is a mix of writing, discussion, and reading aloud. It’s open to writers of all genres. No advance reading is required.
Reading
