The Lit Room
Tuesday November 4th, 2025 with Susan Johnston
Isabella Wang. November, November (Nightwood, 2025)

In this first episode, Susan talks with Canadian poet Isabella Wang. An immigrant writer who came to Canada at the age of seven, Wang now lives and writes on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is the author of November, November (Nightwood, 2025), Pebble Swing (Nightwood, 2021)—a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize—and the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). Wang’s work has appeared in more than thirty literary journals and five anthologies, and she has been recognized by many of Canada’s leading poetry contests, including Arc’s Poem of the Year and The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award. She is also the youngest writer to have been shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Her latest collection, November, November, was written across four Novembers and explores two powerful rites of passage: a tribute to the late poet Phyllis Webb and Wang’s own journey through illness and recovery. With grace and emotional precision, her poems invite us to sit with loss, transformation, and the quiet resilience of the human voice.