Artist

Sonja Ahlers

Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and poet based in Victoria, Canada, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Since the early ’90s, Ahlers has worked primarily in zines, book and book-adjacent formats, in a medium that she calls visual poetry. She is the author of Temper, Temper and Fatal Distraction (Insomniac Press, 1998 and 2004), The Selves (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010), Swan Song (Conundrum Press, 2021, and Growing Pains (flask publishing, 2026). She was a key contributor to Rookie from 2011 to 2015. In 2023, a major survey of her work, Classification Crisis, was co-published by Conundrum Press and the Richmond Art Gallery in conjunction with a 30-year retrospective of her work.