Diaspora Debuts

Join Massy Arts, Li Charmaine Anne, Jane Shi, Léa Taranto and Yilin Wang in Conversation on Tuesday, November 12th at 6 pm!

Venue & Accessibility:

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.

Registration is free or by donation and required for entry.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home.

Thank you kindly.

This event was made possible by the Government of Canada, the Writers' Union of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts.

About the Books:

Crash Landing:

https://storestock.massybooks.com/item/AqcRg-lCq6HrOxo5TVTeeg

Jay Wong wants her last year of high school to finally give her some stories worth telling. Then she meets Ash Chan: confident, intensely independent, and hell on a skateboard. Offering to film Ash’s submission to an upcoming skate contest introduces Jay to a different side of Vancouver and gives her the chance to push back against expectations. As things between Ash and Jay ride the fine line between friendship and something more, Jay must decide just how much Ash will impact her choices.

echolalia echolalia:

https://storestock.massybooks.com/item/LsYOQ1babcwZ239vJPzINQ

In Jane Shi's echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one's chosen family, love and justice.

A Drop in the Ocean:

https://storestock.massybooks.com/item/6nvBPLOyqFiibkcez9q61w

Mixed race teen Mira’s OCD and anorexia have gotten her passed around psych wards like a hot potato. The brutal, religious compulsions she believes keep her mom safe make her less of a clean freak and more of a freak freak. On the Residency’s Ward Two, Mira’s wardmates have enough high-risk behaviors to tolerate hers. Her complex friendships with them, trust she builds with her treatment team, and outside passes give her things to look forward to. But it takes visiting her dying gung gung for her to realize that, to truly live, she must discover who she is beyond her diagnosis.

The Lantern and the Night Moths:

https://storestock.massybooks.com/item/AS48k97jmWPcnVp2x5iD5Q

In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.

About the Authors:

Li Charmaine Anne: Li Charmaine Anne (she/they) grew up in the unceded Coast Salish territories otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia where she currently lives, skates, writes, and makes music. Charmaine holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and shorter works of hers have been appeared in This Magazine, Plenitude Magazine, Currents: A Ricepaper Anthology, and more. Crash Landing has been selected as a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award: Young People’s Literature - Text.

Jane Shi: Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Project blog, Briarpatch Magazine, and The Offing, among others. She is the winner of The Capilano Review's 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest and author of the chapbook Leaving Chang'e on Read (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022). echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) is her debut poetry collection. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.

Léa Taranto: Léa Taranto(she/her) is a disabled, Chinese Jewish Canadian writer who spent her childhood reading fantasy. Her adolescence was similar, except certified in various inpatient facilities for life-threatening obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. A University of British Columbia MFA graduate and Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio alumnus, she often writes about neurodivergence and its intersectionalities. Her writing has been published in the anthology Upon a Midnight Clear: More Christmas Epiphanies and in various Canadian literary journals. A Drop in the Ocean, forthcoming in May 2025, is her debut novel. Find her beachcombing on the traditional, unceded land of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Halkomelem) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) speaking peoples in BC.

Yilin Wang: Yilin Wang (she/they) is a queer Chinese diaspora writer, poet, Chinese-English translator, and editor. Her debut collection of translated poetry and essays on translation, The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024), has been described by reviewers as “exceptional” (Quill & Quire, starred review), “stunning” (Book Riot), a “gift” and “labor of love” (The Miramichi Reader), and “careful work and keen commentary” (Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation). Her writing and translations have appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Words Without Borders, The Tyee, Room, Canthius, and elsewhere. She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, been a finalist for Canada’s National Magazine Award in poetry, been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and been a finalist for the Aurora Award.

Host or Publisher Massy Arts Society