The Irving K. Barber Centre is proud to present writers Ray Hsu and Evelyn Lau, who will appear at an upcoming instalment of the Robson Reading Series.
Ray Hsu is a poet, activist and scholar who teaches creative writing at UBC. His book Anthropy won the 2005 League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has published over 100 poems in more than 35 journals across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., including Fence, The Fiddlehead, and New American Writing. Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, the follow-up to Anthropy, is the second book in a prospective trilogy that explores the “grammar of personhood.”
Evelyn Lau was born in Vancouver in 1971. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, two works of non-fiction, two short story collections and a novel. Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, published when she was 18, was a Canadian bestseller and was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Lau’s prose books have been translated into a dozen languages worldwide. You Are Not Who You Claim won the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award; Oedipal Dreams was nominated for the Governor-General’s Award. Her work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines, garnering four Western Magazine Awards and a National Magazine Award. She has also won the Air Canada Award for Most Promising Writer and the Vantage Women of Originality Award. Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry and Best Canadian Poetry series. She has read from and discussed her work at literary festivals and universities around the world; she has freelanced as a mentor to aspiring writers through UBC’s Booming Ground and SFU’s Writing and Publishing Program.
Living Under Plastic represents a major departure from Lau’s previous poetry books. It opens up to explore new subjects: family history, illness, death and dying, consumerism and the natural world. In a tone that is often elegiac, without ever being maudlin, these poems are steeped in immortality and loss.
This Robson Reading Series event takes place on Thursday, February 24 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. in the Victoria Learning Theatre (Room 182), located on the lower level of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
You can find more information about the Robson Reading Series here.
