Rita Wong

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Bio

Living on the unceded lands of the Tsleil Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish peoples, Rita Wong is guided by questions of respect for water, collective health and just relationship. She has written several books of poetry exploring the intersections of life, language, water and land, and co-edited the anthology Downstream: Reimagining Water (2017) with Dorothy Christian. Rita has received the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award. Her book forage was selected for Canada Reads Poetry in 2011. Her work calls in readers to recognize their responsibilities to the land, the planet, and their communities. She is committed to collective action to address the climate crisis and systemic inequities through an economy of care and solidarity.

Websites:

• National Observer: We Can All Learn Wetsuweten Laws
• The Tyee: Lessons From Prison
• Rabble.ca: RCMP at Fairy Creek Blockade Ignore the Real Emergency

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Research Interests

Rita Wong asserts that culture can save lives when we understand our interdependence and our reliance upon the land, air and water. She is active in contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology and decolonization. She works with the poetics of water, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the Downstream gathering, which resulted in an anthology. Listening to the waters and Indigenous communities, from Coast Salish to Wet'suwet'en to Gitxsan to Dane Zaa knowledge keepers and more has been teaching her how vital land protection is for a livable earth. Rita completed her doctoral studies at SFU on Asian North American cultural production. As an instructor and public intellectual curious about this world, she values critical inquiry, respect for difference and attentive listening. She is learning immensely from Palestinian poets about humanity, internationalist solidarity, love, grief, sumud and interdependence. Rita’s books include monkeypuzzle, forage, sybil unrest (with Larissa Lai), undercurrent, perpetual (with Cindy Mochizuki), beholden (with Fred Wah) and current, climate.