Rita Wong
| Rita Wong | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1968 Calgary, Alberta, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Ethnicity | Chinese |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Website | |
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Rita Wong (born 1968) is a Canadian poet.
Wong grew up in Calgary, Alberta and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is the author of two books of poetry, monkeypuzzle and forage. Her work investigates the relationships between social justice, ecology, decolonization, and contemporary poetics. Wong is an assistant professor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, teaching Critical and Cultural Studies. She has another course in development, Cultivating Ecological, Cross-Cultural, and Interdisciplinary Contemplations of Water. She is also a visiting instructor at the University of Miami.
Wong graduated with a BA (Hons) in 1990 from the University of Calgary. She received master's degrees in 1992 from the University of Alberta and in 1996 from the University of British Columbia. In 2003 she received her PhD from Simon Fraser University.
Wong's first poetry collection, monkeypuzzle, was published by Press Gang in 1998. Reviewer Sook C. Kong in Herizons called it "a huge achievement." Mark Libin for Canadian Literature agreed that the collection "does indeed, as the book jacket declares, announce a promising new voice in Canadian literature." Wong's poems in the volume address her identity as a bisexual Asian woman.
forage, a second collection, was published in 2007; it explores how ecological crises relate to the injustices of the international political landscape. In Wong's words, "the next shift may be the biggest one yet, the union of the living, from mosquito to manatee to mom." Aaron Giovannone in Canadian Literature called the book "a dynamic mixture of styles .... [that] coheres because of the author’s voice, which is emboldened by a sense of sheer affront and the need to find “ground to push against, red earth, / bloody earth, stolen earth.”" The book won the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Prize.
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