{"id":46564,"date":"2016-04-12T22:53:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T22:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46564"},"modified":"2016-04-22T01:34:08","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T01:34:08","slug":"hybrid-details-honoring-fred-wah-with-fred-wah-wo-chan-mark-nowak-and-jeff-derksen%ef%bb%bf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46564","title":{"rendered":"Hybrid Details: Honoring Fred Wah: with Fred Wah, Wo Chan, Mark Nowak and Jeff Derksen\ufeff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hybrid Details: Honoring Fred Wah: with Fred Wah, Wo Chan, Mark Nowak and Jeff Derksen<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Asian American Writers’ Workshop<\/a>
\n112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
\nNew York, New York 11366
\nWednesday, 2016-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Poet Fred Wah<\/a> is a living legend in Canada<\/a>, but he remains woefully under-read in this country. To remedy that, we\u2019re celebrating Fred\u2019s oeuvre<\/a>–a jazzy, radical exploration of place and racial hybridity–and the publication of Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems<\/em><\/a>, 1962\u20131991 (Talonbooks 2016). We\u2019ll have Fred himself, on a rare visit from Canada, and acclaimed poets Wo Chan<\/a>, Mark Nowak<\/a>, and Jeff Derksen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A hapa poet who grew up in his father\u2019s Chinese restaurant, Fred is the winner of the Governor General\u2019s Award<\/a> (Canada\u2019s highest literary award), served as the country\u2019s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate<\/a>, and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada<\/a> in 2013. He has been compared to the American experimental poets–like the Language Poets and Objectivists Charles Olson<\/a> and Robert Creeley<\/a>, with whom he studied–but Fred\u2019s work is informed by his identity growing up in a Chinese-Irish-Scots and Swedish household and his relationship to the countryside of British Columbia<\/a>. A self-described \u201cKootenay boy,\u201d Wah has said, \u201cMy writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local, the landscape of the Kootenays<\/a> in southeastern BC<\/a>; it mountains, lakes, and forests.\u201d The editor of several important Canadian literary journals (TISH<\/em>, Open Letter<\/em>, West Coast Line<\/em>), Fred is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Waiting For Saskatchewan<\/a><\/em> (Turnstone 1985) (this Governor\u2019s General award-winner explores Saskatchewan<\/a>, \u201ca place that held, for me,\u201d Fred states, \u201cthe complications of a mixed-race family history and the geographical site for an Asian-European intersection\u201d) and Diamond Grill<\/a><\/em> (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1996), a coming-of-age collection based on childhood memories working at his father\u2019s Chinese restaurant. Scree<\/em> collects almost a half century of work, ranging from visual poetry and jazzy riffs to Black Mountain-style open poems about the Canadian landscape to new narrative prose poems and Haibun<\/a>. As the poet Rob McLennan<\/a> writes, \u201cThe dialogue between Fred Wah\u2019s earlier works tests the possibilities of a poetics of place, of a syntactic dynamism opened by the North American postwar experiments in form and a push against the Western box of knowledge (a push that is threaded through 1960s counterculture up to the globalization of the early 1990s).\u201d<\/p>\n

Three award-winning poets will read and comment on Fred\u2019s poems: Wo Chan and Mark Nowak. A queer Fujianese poet and drag performer, Wo Chan was a 2015 AAWW Margins Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary; read Wo\u2019s poems Such as and Chopped in The Margins. Guggenheim Fellow and former labor organizer Mark Nowak is the author of Shut Up Shut Down<\/em> (Coffee House Press 2004, afterword by Amiri Baraka<\/a>), named a The New York Times<\/em> \u201cEditor\u2019s Choice,\u201d and the acclaimed book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary<\/em> (Coffee House Press 2009), which Howard Zinn<\/a> called \u201ca stunning educational tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moderated by Simon Fraser University Professors Jeff Derksen. A poet and theorist at the nexus of geography, cultural production, and globalization, Jeff co-founded Vancouver\u2019s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing. He has written several books including The Vestiges<\/em> (2013), Transnational Muscle Cars<\/em> (2010) and Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics<\/em> (2010), all from Talonbooks.<\/p>\n

Co-sponsored by the Manhattanville MFA program<\/em><\/p>\n

For more information, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hybrid Details: Honoring Fred Wah: with Fred Wah, Wo Chan, Mark Nowak and Jeff Derksen Asian American Writers’ Workshop 112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor New York, New York 11366 Wednesday, 2016-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time) Poet Fred Wah is a living legend in Canada, but he remains woefully under-read in this country. To remedy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,13,8,20],"tags":[23506,16449,8386,20660,23505,23504],"class_list":["post-46564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-liveevents","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-aaww","tag-asian-american-writers-workshop","tag-fred-wah","tag-jeff-derksen","tag-mark-nowak","tag-wo-chan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46564"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46569,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46564\/revisions\/46569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}