Lunch Poems presents Roy Miki and Mercedes Eng

Lunch Poems at SFU is a unique opportunity to celebrate the spoken word held the third Wednesday of every month, from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., in the Teck Gallery at Simon Fraser University's Vancouver Campus.

The raison d'être of Lunch Poems is to invite and welcome everyone to enjoy poetry in a relaxed and casual atmosphere: whether you are new to poetry or have had a long romance with it. We invite you to join us to lunch on words and feed your soul. No fees or registration. Just bring your lunch, curiosity, open mind and love of words.

Since our inaugural poetry reading on March 28, 2012 featuring Vancouver's Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau, Lunch Poems has hosted a wide range of poets and their works reflecting the rich diversity of the poetry scene in our community.

Roy Miki grew up in Winnipeg and moved to Vancouver in 1967. He has published widely on Asian Canadian writing, Canadian literature, cultural activism and contemporary poetry, and has edited works by George Bowering, bpNichol and Roy K. Kiyooka. He is the author of Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (2004) and In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011), as well as six books of poems. His third book of poems, Surrender (2001), received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Cloudy and Clear, his sixth book of poems, is part of Flow: Poems Collected and New (2018). He has also co-written, with his wife Slavia, a children’s book, Dolphin SOS (2014), awarded the 2014 BC Book Prize for best illustrated children’s book.

Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born mixee of Chinese and settler descent, teaching and writing in classrooms and in community. She lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Peoples. Her praxis constellates experiential knowledge, community organizing, informal study, and a hybrid poetics that deploys multiple forms/ideas of language from theory to memoir to historical and government documents to photography and visual art. She is the author of Mercenary English, a long poem about violence and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, the BC Book Prize-winning Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, and my yt mama forthcoming in Spring 2020.
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