Peace and Harmony through Poetry and Music Project 2025
Peace and Harmony through Poetry and Music is a cross-disciplinary collaboration uniting poets and musicians to explore language, sound, and cultural expression. Through compositions, performances, and filming, the project weaves poetry and music into a unified experience, fostering cross-cultural dialogue, creative exchange, and a shared vision of peace and harmony.
Poet Anna Yin will lead this project and collaborate with three to four musicians from diverse cultural and musical backgrounds. The creative process will include:
- Selecting poems for musical adaptation or composing new poetry inspired by the musicians’ work.
- Developing and refining 5–7 poetry-music pieces about peace and harmony for digital or live presentation. （Some samples to work on...)
- (Incorporating both Eastern and Western traditional instruments, such as the Morin Khuur, violin, piano, guitar, and drums, to create rich, multicultural presentation)
The project will unfold over five months (May to Oct 2025) and involve:
- Selection & Concept Development – Choosing poems and musical styles (May).
- Creation & Rehearsals – Collaborative composition and refinement (June–July).
- Public Presentation – Launching a YouTube channel for showcasing recordings and organizing live performances (September).
Five local artists and musicians agreed to join Anna for this project: Mark Harry (guitarist), Li Ming (morin khuur player/painter), Sarah Hei (filmmaker, team member of my previous poetry film project), and Wendy (composer, violinist, singer, and dancer). Li Jin (composer). Here are their biographies. More might join us as the project unfolds. Here artists are not seek perfection but rather aims to foster and inspire new creativity.
We are very happy that this project won a Matchmaker Microgrant from MAC in 2025 and sponsorship from local business and artists, this project has been planned to start on May 1, 2025. We want to thank the following sponsors:
Breaking into Blossom is ready for per-ordering! Congratulations
Thanks Frontenac House. Now Breaking into Blossom is ready for pre-ordering… We hope in the coming National Poetry month, you can receive it as a perfect poetry gift!. #books #poetry #publishing
Here is a poet who finds authority in endurance. With a deepening craft, Anna Yin confronts bereavement, repression, displacement, and the complexities of love in poems that are heartfelt and crystalline. –Richard Greene:
Anna Yin’s poems ‘breathe in two languages,’ creating a lovely tension between immediacy and distance that feels as though two points on a globe have been connected by a flight path. Her imagery is deeply sensual, compelling yet delicate. Her lines hover in our minds like the dream that “finds his own key, unlocks the door and comes inside.” —Alice Major
From Molly Peacock:
In her gorgeous book, Breaking into Blossom, Anna Yin’s poetry is like the interior of the abalone shell she depicts, “emerald… just shining.” Almost anything or anyone in this volume can break unexpectedly into blossom, including the poems themselves, often concluding with unanticipated discoveries. The book undulates with observations and the animated sur-reality of all kinds of exchanges, from an interview with a painter to the poet’s father’s late life words to a desperate woman stepping on a Forget-me-not. “The career of flowers differs from us only in inaudibleness,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins, and Yin’s buoyant inspirations from poets across time, Li Po to Wallace Stevens, Akhmatova to Dickinson herself, give voice to subtly noticed feelings and thoughts. Anna Yin is fast becoming a Canadian treasure.
Anna Yin’s more works showcased in USA, Hongkong, Taiwan & Canada
创世纪诗刊选用Anna三首华语新诗： 沉默，风信子，金陵。 proud for their work persisting in 70 years!
From Vancouver for Anna’s two Chinese poems
from hongkong for Anna’s poem: Brueghel’s Two Monkeys… thanks 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine
Poetry and Music (The Seeking Heart) in both Chinese and English (心之寻–诗歌与音乐）
After watching 2025 Spring Festival Gala at Living Arts Center, Mississauga, Anna Yin wrote a poem: The Seeking Heart in both Chinese and English, then made poetry and music videos. We share them here with you and hope you too enjoy the beautiful music and create your own poems. Cheers. #poetry #music #videos The poem is also on Live Encounters Poetry and Writings March 2025
More of Anna Yin’s translations published in the USA and Canada
Congratulations! Tupelo Quarterly accepted Anna Yin’s translation : “Thirteen Short Poems to Chew On” from 严力‘s Chinese poems. It is now on the issue of January.
The Prairie Journal published two of Anna Yin’s translations of 木西’s Chinese poems.
Anna Yin’s two other translations of 严力’s Chinese poems (Textbook & Falling) were accepted by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal for En Route.
Anna Yin’s translation of 颜艾琳’s 超級販賣機 will be in Queen’s Quarterly’s summer 2025 issue. Thanks! #poetry #translations
MAC selected Polyphonic celebration for Mississauga’s 50th Anniversary project as 2024 success
“Poet and author Anna Yin used her Matchmaker MicroGrant to produce the ebook Polyphonic celebration for Mississauga’s 50th Anniversary – 2024. This heartfelt, community-engaged work captures the essence of local artists, particularly writers, celebrating Mississauga’s 50th anniversary through poems, stories, paintings, and photos. The ebook can be served as a “yearbook” of 2024, and captures writing in English, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Persian.
The book is written in three parts – the first explores the friendship between Mississauga and its sister city, Kariya, Japan, through poetry, particularly haikus. The second section features interviews with Mississauga community leaders and poetry writing on events that took place in Mississauga in 2024 and prior. Highlights include tributes to long-running Mayor Hazel McCallion and insights into what the future of Mississauga will hold. The final part showcases haikus written by students at Clifford International School in Guangzhou, China, guided by Anna during her 2024 travels. ” — Mississauga Arts Council, Oct 24, 2024
Six Canadian Poets read from new or forthcoming books at Toronto Public Library on Oct 23, 2024
“A rich multi-cultural exchange through six Canadian poets” brought together six poets from diverse backgrounds, showcasing their latest and upcoming books at Albert Campbell Branch, Toronto Public Library on Oct 23, 2024. Through their readings and discussions they created a tapestry of stories and emotions that transcend borders. These six poets were Anna Yin, DC Reid, Allan Briesmaster, Bunny Iskov, Clara Blackwood and Ling Ge.
This program is generously funded with the support of the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Welcome to Oct events, Poet in Class and Poetry reading and more
Welcome to October, 2024…. Anna Yin will complete MAC grant project soon and will have two other events: Poet in Class and 6 poets reading at Toronto public library. Thanks Mississauga Arts Council, Poetry In Voice / Les voix de la poésieThe League of Canadian Poets.
Sureway Press will have another book of translations (After Midnight/子夜过后）ready for Thanksgivings.
“After Midnight/ 子夜过后” by Katherine L . Gordon, Chinese trans by Anna Yin will be published soon, Congratulations
ISBN/国际书号： 978-1-998911-04-2
Book Design/诗集设计: Anna Yin (星子安娜) Book Cover/封面设计：Oliver Yang（杨鸿）
Foreword
After Midnight is a collection of poems that reflect some vibrant years of discovery, observation and experience of what being alive in this vast sea of life really means for each of us, as we seek a place in a huge and complicated universe. Some of it is lonely, some of it so intimately connected with all natural phenomena that we are never truly alone.
We mature into connection: a moon-beam caught on the path, a leaf before winter in our hand, a rose opening in wonder, a heart that beats with wind and water murmur. The closer we draw to the miraculous world we are all born into, the more part of cosmic motion we are bound to feel. It is the only antidote to that anxiety of separation, the only comfort in love gone astray, health disappeared, hope a spark that needs fanning.
All of us fade into other star-fields, our words, art and music may remain, though it may be “after midnight” that they appear to us.
Katherine L. Gordon， tumultuous year of climate and history, 2024
KATHERINE L. GORDON : MOON PASSION IN THE SHIFT OF EARTH
VIDEO AND MUSIC BY EVAN GORDON
This is a poem for Dylan Thomas Day 2024 which won a price in Italy.
Katherine also won 2024 IL MELETO DI GUIDO GOZZANO poetry contest the SECOND PRIZE.
美丽的邂逅/Beautiful Encounters from this book was on 《漂木诗刊》
Steven Xu review this book on Live Encounters Poetry and Writings (Feb, 2025)