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A Discussion with Author Kyo Lee

in partnership with Words Worth Books

For Teens & Adults

About the Event

Join teen author Kyo Lee for a discussion about her debut poetry collection, i cut my tongue on a broken country, with moderator Tanis MacDonald.

This event is open to teens (13+) and adults, offering a great opportunity for poetry lovers of all ages to connect with the author and explore the power of words.

Following the author talk, teens and students are invited to participate in a poetry workshop led by Kyo from 7:15pm to 8:00pm in the program room. Please register separately for the teen workshop.

This program is presented in partnership with Words Worth Books.

About the Author

Kyo Lee is a Korean-Canadian student from Waterloo, Ontario. She is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her literature also appears in Narrative, Nimrod, Prism, The Forge, and This Magazine, among others. She loves colourful skies, summer peaches, and oceans.

About the Book

i cut my tongue on a broken country is Kyo Lee's debut poetry collection about reconciling with oneself and learning to love, through a youthful, queer diasporic Korean lens. Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future.

Lee's collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. i cut my tongue on a broken country explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself.

i cut my tongue on a broken country documents a search for love. It's a eulogy for the things we gave up to get here. It's an ode to tenderness. It blossoms and bleeds in your hands.

About the Moderator

Tanis MacDonald (she/her) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female and six other books. A free-range literary animal, Tanis has won the Open Seasons Award twice: once in 2021 for her essay of female friendship and music fandom, and again in 2025 for her essay on adoption and ancestry. She has twice been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and took an honourable mention in the Pavlick Poetry Prize in 2021. Tanis was raised in Treaty One territory and now lives as a grateful guest on Haldimand Treaty land, near the Grand River in southwestern Ontario, where she teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press.

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For larger public events, please note that by attending, you are consenting to the use of your appearance, image, and voice in print or digital productions created by the Waterloo Public Library for promotional use only. Please speak to library staff at the event if you’d like to be excluded from any photo/video. 

Programmer: Ikhlas