small, deferred: On Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Writing
Authors
- Vinh Nguyen University of Waterloo
- Beth Follett
- Bryan Thao Worra
- Candida Rifkind University of Winnipeg
- Joanne Leow University of Saskatchewan
- Warren Heiti Vancouver Island University
- Guy Beauregard National Taiwan University
- Denise Cruz Columbia University
- Y-Dang Troeung University of British Columbia
- Anjula Gogia
- Souvankham Thammavongsa
Abstract
Forum on Sovankham Thammavongsa's writing.
Author Biographies
Beth Follett
Beth Follett is the founder and publisher of the Canadian literary publishing house, Pedlar Press. Her first novel, Tell It Slant (Coach House Books 2001), was followed by YesNo (Fieldnotes, 2011), an essay in chapbook form, and two poetry chapbooks, Bone Hinged (paperplates, 2010) and A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters (Apt. 9, 2014). Her second novel, Instructor, will be released on March 2021 (Breakwater Books). Follett lives in St. John’s, NL.
Bryan Thao Worra
Bryan Thao Worra is the Lao Minnesotan Poet Laureate and holds a Joyce Award, an NEA Fellowship in Literature, and over twenty other distinctions for his creative writing. An internationally published author of more than eight books, he serves on the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans in addition to numerous community roles in Southeast Asian refugee resettlement and the arts. His current book of poetry is Before We Remember We Dream from Sahtu Press.
Candida Rifkind, University of Winnipeg
Candida Rifkind is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she specializes in graphic narratives and Canadian literature. She is co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage (Palgrave 2020); Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2016), which won 2016 the Gabrielle Roy Prize; and a special issue of a/b: Auto/biography Studies on “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives” (2020). Her monograph, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (2009), won the 2010 Anne Saddlemyer Prize.
Joanne Leow, University of Saskatchewan
Joanne Leow lives as a guest on Treaty Six Territory and the homeland of the Métis. She is Assistant Professor of decolonizing, diasporic, and transnational literatures at the University of Saskatchewan. Her most recent research is in positions: asia critique, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies. Her first book manuscript theorizes the relationship between cultural dissidence and urban planning in Singapore. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Brick, Catapult, The Goose, Isle, The Kindling, The Town Crier, QLRS, and Ricepaper Magazine. Her ecocritical SSHRC-funded project “Intertidal Polyphonies” is archived at intertidal.usask.ca.
Warren Heiti, Vancouver Island University
Warren Heiti lives in Nanaimo where he teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Liberal Studies at Vancouver Island University. He is the author of Hydrologos (Pedlar Press, 2011) and co-editor of Chamber Music: The Poetry of Jan Zwicky (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015).
Guy Beauregard, National Taiwan University
Guy Beauregard is a Professor at National Taiwan University and an Associate Member of Simon Fraser University’s Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research. His work over the past decade has appeared in Amerasia Journal, Canadian Literature, Concentric, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, Tamkang Review, and West Coast Line. Most recently, he has co-edited The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique (Temple UP, 2020).
Denise Cruz, Columbia University
Denise Cruz is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research documents and explores national, regional, and global dynamics in Asian North American, Filipinx, and US literature, culture, and history, with special attention to gender and sexuality. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: the Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke UP, 2012).
Y-Dang Troeung, University of British Columbia
Y-Dang Troeung is a mother, researcher, writer, and Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. She is also a 2020/2021 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Y-Dang grew up in a small town in Southwestern, Ontario, Canada before pursuing her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at the University of Waterloo and McMaster University. She lived in Hong Kong for six years before beginning her position at UBC in 2018. As a graduate student, she published her first scholarly essay in Canadian Literature in 2010 and is now happy to be affiliated with the journal as an Associate Editor.
Anjula Gogia
Anjula Gogia is events coordinator at Another Story Bookshop. She is the former co-manager of the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and has worked at Between the Lines, PEN Canada and Amnesty International. She loves to read, cook, and hang out in the sun.
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four acclaimed poetry books—Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003), winner of the ReLit prize; Found (Pedlar Press, 2007), now a short film screened worldwide; Light (Pedlar Press, 2013), winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; and Cluster (McClelland & Stewart, 2019)—and the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada; Little, Brown in the U.S; and Bloomsbury in the U.K., a New York Times Critics' Choice and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, won an O. Henry Award and appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Believer, Journey Prize Stories 2016, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, O. Henry Prize Stories 2019, Best Canadian Essays 2019, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, and Best Canadian Fiction 2020. She has been in residence at Yaddo and performed her work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand and was raised and educated in Toronto where she now lives.
