"Lara Bozabalian has earned her place as one of Canada's most talented poets." ~ David Silverberg
Lara Bozabalian
Poet, educator, and artist exploring memory, place and inheritance.
About Lara
Lara has featured at literary festivals across North America, Ireland, and in Singapore. A celebrated TEDx speaker, Lara also wrote and narrated Crowd the Schoolhouse, a short documentary that won Best Writing and Best Use of Genre at Hot Docs International Documentary Challenge. She has lectured at many institutions, including Queen's University in Kingston, on poetry, critical thinking, memory, and inheritance.
Between 2022-2024, Lara completed The Poetry of Public Places, a broad public installation project supported by Canada Council for the Arts. This interdisciplinary work explored how poetry can disrupt and reimagine public spaces by embedding verse into the physical and digital landscapes of everyday life. With a focus on de-centering dominant narratives and amplifying marginalized perspectives—especially those of women, caregivers, and racialized communities—The Poetry of Public Places blurs the boundaries between the intimate and the civic, making space for stories that shape how we live and belong.
As the Head of English at a public high school, Lara has been a dynamic force in arts education over the last two decades. In 2008, she founded Be Heard: Festival of Student Voices, a large-scale initiative that has connected thousands of student writers with internationally renowned spoken word artists through workshops and performances. During the pandemic and afteshe co-led, with educator Alison Thorpe, a virtual Writer's Guild to create a safe space for students from across York Region. At the school board level, Lara was honoured to build, alongside Indigenous Consultants, a model for the first Ontario Grade 11 English course dedicated to examining First Nations, Métis, and Inuit voices, now a model for teachers across the district.
Lara is also a founding member of Toronto Poetry Project, which produces Canada’s most successful spoken word series, including Toronto Poetry Slam, BAM Youth Slam, and city-wide writing workshops. As a spoken word artist, she has represented Toronto at the Individual World Poetry Slam, Women of the World Poetry Slam, and the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. In both 2014 & 2015, she was named in NOW Magazine as Toronto's Best Poet.
The Poetry of Public Spaces (Toronto, 2022-2024) interrograted public norms with large visual and literal installations meant to explore the internal lives of those who travelled through them.
Featured in the Poetry in Voice (Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry) Senior Poem Anthology and the Mixed Tape Seried, edited by Brendan MacLeod.
Milk Teeth Collective
Milk Teeth Collective is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Lara and visual artist/designer Una Janićijević. This work explores the intersections of care, art, and equity through public interventions, zines, books and curriculum development. Through collaborative artistic endeavour, Lara and Una create spaces that honour the experiences of artist-caregivers and their children, reimagining galleries, sidewalks, and classrooms as sites of shared authorship.
They work with poetry, image, and education to unsettle traditional narratives about who belongs in the art world. MTC projects draw on lived experience and collective struggle—acknowledging how class, race, gender, disability, and geography shape access to creativity. With roots in community-building and critical pedagogy, this collective honours care as cultural production.
How to Grow a Future fuses Una’s collages with Lara’s poetic language to cultivate slow, intergenerational dialogue between humans and the more-than-human world. Poems, images, and community reflections circulate like seeds through galleries, zines, classrooms, and public projections.
Blackout Poetry/Collage pieces were published by Milk Teeth Collective in PoetryXCollage in January 2026.
'teaching' is a collection of poetry that delves into the hearts and minds of the modern school system. From labrynthian hallways, to Snap Chat all-nighters, this text deconstructs and reimagines possibilities through the stories of students and teachers. Collages by Una Janicijevic.
In 2025, Milkteeth Collective launched Art Audit: Children’s Voices in the Art World, a research-based pilot project that centers the voices of children and artist-caregivers in the evaluation of public art spaces. This research-based evaluation is supported in part by Balancing Act Canada and MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project as part of the Level UP! initiative.
Book A Workshop
As a seasoned educator, poet, and creative facilitator, I bring over two decades of experience—from highschool classrooms to university lecture halls, and from national poetry festivals to spoken word platforms. Reach out and connect;
I would be happy to tailor a workshop to your needs.
” One of the finest examples of wordsmithing I’ve ever laid ears on.”
~ Shayne Koyczan, author of bestsellers ‘Stickboy’ and ‘To This Day’
Recent Engagement Highlights:
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Conference keynote: York University 2022 International Conference on Mothering—exploring mother/artist identity post-pandemic
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Niagara University, April 2025 — The Hearts and Minds of Modern Schools
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Niagara University, April 2026 — The Power of Care
Being invited to participate in an internaltional panel in the midst of COVID was invigorating and heartening, to say the least. Having a platform in which to share my own private expriences in order to support fellow artist mothers, was one of the most valuable vitamins that the pandemic brought me. I continue to love connecting with groups of all kinds, in order to build community and ideas. Reach out, I wouldl ove ot hear from you.