Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939, and he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. Studying at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960s, he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH.
Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize for Poetry, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor General’s Award, and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013.
Rita Wong was born in 1968 and grew up in Calgary. She has taught English in China, Japan, and Canada, and currently lives in Vancouver where she remains active as a writer, activist, and archivist. In 1997 she received the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop emerging writer award. She is currently teaching at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.
Jeff Derksen is a poet, critic, and professor who lives in Vancouver and Vienna. His poetry books include The Vestiges, Transnational Muscle Cars, and Down Time (Winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). His critical books include After Euphoria, Annhilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics, and the folio How High is the City, How Deep is Our Love. He works on artistic research projects with the collective Urban Subjects: their books include The Militant Image Reader, Momentarily: Learning from Mega Events, and Autogestion: Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade. As curators, they brought The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century to the Museum of Vancouver and curated the exhibition If Time Is Still Alive at Camera Austria. He was a founding member of both the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. Derksen works at Simon Fraser University and is a Fullbright Fellow and former research fellow at the Centre for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
