Celebrating The Lantern and the Night Moths: Yilin Wang and Guests

This event is organized and co-sponsored by SFU’s David Lam Centre. We thank SFU’s Department of English, SFU’s Department of World Languages and Literatures, and SFU’s Global Asia Program as co-sponsors. We are also grateful for the support of the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Join us for a reading and panel discussion in celebration of Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang's debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths. The book features her English translations of work by five modern Chinese poets--Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu--alongside her personal essays on her journey as a translator and the art of translation.

“Yilin Wang’s translation is an intensely loving conversation with the poets she considers her zhīyīn—soul friends who know her sound, her song." -- Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, poet and translator of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện

“This is the collection of Chinese poetry in translation that I have been waiting for. The translations are exquisite and moving, and more than that, they have been carefully selected by the poet–translator Yilin Wang to speak to the concerns, observations, and shared emotional experiences of Chinese poets and a wide-ranging Chinese diaspora. Her short essays foreground the living, creative and relational nature of translation work itself.”—Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century and Iron Goddess of Mercy

Yilin will be joined by two guest readers and poets—Isabella Wang and Dr. Joanne Leow (Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in English). The event will be moderated by Dr. Melek Ortabasi (Associate Dean of FASS and Associate Professor in World Languages and Literatures).

Books will be available for sale.

This event is organized by Dr. Yiwen Liu. The poster is designed by Joelle Lee.

Short Bios

Yilin Wang: author of the book

Yilin Wang 王艺霖 (she/they) is a writer, a poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, The Tyee, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024). Her translations have also appeared in Room, Asymptote, Samovar, The Common, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada’s National Magazine Award, been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and been a finalist for an Aurora Award. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Melek Ortabasi: Moderator of the event

Melek Ortabasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at SFU, specializing in Japanese and German literature. She teaches courses that are informed by her research interests: translation theory and practice, popular culture and transnationalism, and internationalism in children’s literature. She has published books and numerous articles on modern Japanese literature, folklore, anime, and translation studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript on transnationalism and modern Japanese children's literature.

Joanne Leow: Guest Poet and Writer

Joanne Leow is Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her first book manuscript, “Counter-Cartographies,” twines spatial theory, authoritarian urban development and planning, and contemporary Singaporean texts. Her first poetry book “Seas Move Away” (Turnstone Press, 2022) further marries her critical interests with creative writing. Her SSHRC-funded project, “Intertidal Polyphonies,” records and theorizes the sonic materialities, poetics, and politics of reclaimed land in the coastal sites of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vancouver.

Isabella Wang: Guest Poet and Writer

Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. She is in her Masters of Sociology at SFU and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, 4827 Revise Revision St. Her second poetry collection, November, November is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in 2025.