Wine and Words: Dimsum with the Authors

Join us and the LiterASIAN Festival for an afternoon of food and festivities! This fundraiser will include dim sum, wine tastings, author readings, and live and silent auctions. All event proceeds go to supporting this year’s Word Vancouver literary festival in September.

Tickets are $60. Members enjoy a discounted rate at $45 through a promo code.

To receive the promo code and for membership access to other exclusive events and perks, sign up here on the Word Vancouver website!

Hosted by JJ Lee, The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit (Penguin Random House). Featuring authors Candie Tanaka, Baby Drag Queen (Orca Books), David Ly, Dream of Me as Water (Palimpsest Press), David Mura, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives (University Of Minnesota Press), Emi Sasagawa, Atomweight (Tidewater Press), Gillian Sze, The Night is Deep and Wide (Penguin Random House), Hieu Pham-Fraser, The Little Girl (‎FriesenPress), Jack Wang, We Two Alone (House of Anansi), Simon Johnston, House of Daughters (Earnshaw Books Ltd ), Steffi Tad-y, From the Shoreline (Gordon Hill Press), Tariq Malik, Exit Wounds (Caitlin Press), Winnie L. Cheung, Childhood Lost: Memoir of a Self-Taught Grandma Who Grew Up in a War-Torn Country.

See all biographies below.

Winnie L. Cheung was born to refugee parents in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, where she was surrounded by people converging from China and all over the world. She is fascinated by the forces behind people’s migration, and is curious to know how individuals’ identities are shaped by the knowledge of their families’ history. Professionally, Winnie has worked as an educator in universities in Hong Kong and Vancouver, promoting international relations and intercultural understanding. In the community, she has been tirelessly building bridges between first-generation immigrants and local-born Canadians of diverse backgrounds. Her contributions to international understanding, racial harmony and multiculturalism have been recognized by Rotary International, the University of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver, the City of Burnaby and the Provincial Government of British Columbia.

Simon Johnston’s novel, House of Daughters, was released in December 2022. House of Wives, published by Penguin Random House, was a Globe and Mail bestseller in 2016. His short stories have appeared in Ricepaper and other magazines. Simon was born and raised in Hong Kong and educated in Canada at McMaster University ‘72. He has worked extensively in Canada as an artistic director, director, and playwright, and most recently, as the Artistic & Executive Director of the Gateway Theatre from 1999-2012. Simon lives in South Surrey, B.C. with his wife Sheila and their sybaritic cat Dash. www.simonjohnston.ca

David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Poetry Award, and Dream of Me as Water (2022), both published under the Anstruther Books imprint of Palimpsest Press. He is also co-editor (with Daniel Zomparelli) of Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022).

David’s poems have appeared in publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, PRISM International, and The Puritan, where he won the inaugural Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. David is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine.

For the past four decades, Vancouver-based BIPOC author Tāriq Malik has worked across poetry, fiction, and visual arts, to distill immersive and compelling narratives that are always original and intriguing. He writes intensely in response to the world in flux around him and of his place in its shadows. Born in Pakistani Punjab, he came reluctantly late to these shores. He is the author of short stories Rainsongs of Kotli (TSAR Books, 2004), a novel Chanting Denied Shores (Bayeux Arts, 2010), and a poetry collection Exit Wounds (Caitlin, 2022), and offers a poetry masterclass in conjunction with The Polyglot magazine.

David Mura is an Asian American poet, novelist, playwright, critic and performance artist whose writings explore the themes of race, identity and history. In 2018, Mura published a book on creative writing, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing, in which he argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft. Mura has published two memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won the Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1995). His most recent book of poetry is The Last Incantation (2014); his other poetry books include After We Lost Our Way, which won the National Poetry Contest, The Colors of Desire (winner of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award), and Angels for the Burning. His novel is Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire.

Hieu Pham-Fraser has worked as an educator for over twenty-five years. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in education, and diplomas and certificates for English Language Learning and reading intervention. She has taught in elementary, secondary and university settings. She currently works as a school administrator in the Metro Vancouver area.

Pham-Fraser wrote The Little Girl because she saw a need for all members of our societies to understand that name is identity. Many groups and institutions put pressure on individuals to change or anglicize their names. After watching this simple, everyday imposition negatively affecting her students, she made the decision to share her own story. The book has already helped elementary, secondary, and university students critically think how they welcome others who don’t look like them, speak like them, or have the same cultures as they do. Pham-Fraser believes that anti-racism work starts within us first and that stories can open our minds and hearts to what is possible. She lives in Richmond, B.C., with her son, husband, and their beloved dog, Cocoa.

Emi Sasagawa is settler, immigrant, and uninvited guest living and working on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Selilwitulh Nations. She is an award-winning, Brazilian-Japanese storyteller whose work has been published by a range of publications, from The Washington Post to Room. Emi is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU, and is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Her debut novel Atomweight is forthcoming by Tidewater Press.

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She resides in Montreal, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Steffi Tad-y is a poet & writer based in the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, & Tsleil-Waututh Nations, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Her chapbook of poems Merienda published by Rahila’s Ghost Press was nominated for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award. In 2022, she published her debut book of poetry From the Shoreline with Gordon Hill Press. Steffi’s poems often reflect on kinship, diasporic geographies, & formations of the mind.

Candie Tanaka is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.

Jack Wang is the author of We Two Alone, longlisted for Canada Reads 2022 and winner of the 2021 Central New York Book Award in Fiction and the 2020 Danuta Gleed Literary Award from the Writers’ Union of Canada for best debut collection in English. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Journey Prize and has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. He teaches writing at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

JJ Lee wrote the memoir The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit. He teaches creative nonfiction at The Writer's Studio, Simon Fraser University. His essays and features have appeared in ELLE Canada, ELLE Man, Flare, Fashion, Montecristo, and Nuvo magazines. He lives in New Westminster.