Hello, I’m Anna Yin.
In May, I launched the Peace and Harmony through Poetry and Music project to bring together language and music in fresh poetic–musical expressions.
Our team includes guitarist Mark Harry, Morin Khuur player Ming Li, composer and dancer Wendy Zhu, photographer Sarah Hei, and vocal coach Heather Christine. Together, we blended Eastern and Western traditions—poetry, music, and dance—while weaving English and Chinese and even experimenting with AI. To date, our team has created fourteen works, with an additional sixteen by me.
We have shared these works on YouTube, on radio programs such as Howl (Toronto) and World Poetry Café (BC), at live performances in Mississauga, and at major events including the Canada–China Symposium for Poetry Creation in Toronto and the 2025 Stratford Literary Festival.
Highlights include:
- Some Trees Come to Me, inspired by poets from Canada and China, celebrating nature as companion and ancestor.
- Breaking into Blossom, honoring the shared beauty and harmony of Stratford and Mississauga.
- Come and Celebrate with The Beauty of Friendship, created for Mississauga’s heritage and culture.
- My Accent, where poetry, music, and film intertwine to voice the immigrant journey.
- Chinese Nightingale, The Seeking Heart, and Walking with the Star, where tradition meets innovation in live performance.
- There Must Be Something, a music video praising the beauty and harmony of nature, combining poetry, singing, violin, and landscapes from my travels.
This project has never been about perfection, but about collaboration and growth. In such a short summary, I hope you can feel our deep love for peace, creativity, and the bonds between poetry and music. Many of our works can be found on my YouTube channel and the Sureway Press website.
Though this chapter is now complete, its spirit carries forward, and I hope we all continue the journey of peace and harmony.
With gratitude to our sponsors: : Nova Marketing Group, Triple J Canada, Sureway Press, poets Katherine L. Gordon and D.C. Reid, and above all, the Mississauga Arts Council with RAMA Gaming Centre through the Mississauga Charitable Gaming Association.
Written by Anna Yin on Sept 30, 2025
