Each year we try to find some great prizes that help promote literature and the arts.  After all this is a dinner dedicated to the memory of a poet.But how do you make the poetry and art come alive?By having wonderful raffle prizes that will challenge and entertain our audience… and the scotch whisky will help too.Here are some confirmed prizes:

Vancouver Opera: two tickets to an upcoming performance – it might be their upcoming First Nations version of Mozart’s Magic Flute March 9-17th or it could be the premiere of Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul May 4-11th.

The Cultch  aka Vancouver East Cultural Centre – play Winner of the Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, Theatre 2013.   Extraction is a documentary theatre show that delves deep into the heart of intertwined cultural phenomena: China’s rise as an economic power and oil extraction in Alberta. Mining the biographies of non-actor performers, this bilingual (English and Mandarin) play digs beneath the surface of highly charged political debates to illuminate lives transformed by legendary traffic jams, boomtown fever, translation trouble and diplomatic intrigue in Beijing and in Fort McMurray’s tar sands, which has been called one of the largest industrial projects in human history.

Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre: 2 tickets Asian Comedy Night.  Based on comedy skits, this is always very funny.  VACT has been producing some very exciting theatre lately.  Last year it was their original production “Red Letters”, and before that it was Vancouver’s premiere of the Rogers & Hammerstein musical “Flower Drum Song”.  Earlier this month they produced the play “Theory of Everything.”

Arsenal Pulp Press –

Escape to Gold Mountain – the hot new graphic novel written and drawn by David Wong. This is the first graphic novel to tell their story: based on historical documents and interviews with elders, this is a vivid history of the Chinese in their search for “Gold Mountain” (the Chinese colloquialism for North America) as seen through the eyes of the Wong family. They traverse the challenges of eking out an existence in their adopted homeland with hope and determination, creating a poignant immigrant’s legacy for their sons and daughters.  FYI: David Wong is the creator of the Gung Haggis Fat Choy dragon boat team logo, and he paddled on the team for its’ inaugural year in 2002.

Talon Books – Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki, edited by Larissa Lai, Christine Kim, Christopher Lee, and Maia Joseph.