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.
Rita Wong lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories, also known as Vancouver. Dedicated to questions of water justice, decolonization, and ecology, she is the author of monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai), undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015), and perpetual (Nightwood Editions, 2015, with Cindy Mochizuki), as well as the co-editor of downstream: reimagining water (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016, with Dorothy Christian).