Vancouver, B.C.
Emerging writers
LiterASIAN Festival: Celebrating Asian Canadian Writing
Teodoro Alcuitas
Vancouver, BC – Three Filipino authors are among seven Asian Canadian writers participating in the 2020 LiterASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing which opened today until August 30, 2020. The annual festival, the only one of its kind in Canada, celebrates Asian Canadian writing, is sponsored by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW) and Ricepaper Zine Magazine.
Shining a spotlight on Asian Canadian literature, history, and culture, this year’s theme, Postcards From The In-Between, reflects the need to be ‘Quiet No More ‘, at a time when the easiest thing to do would be to remain silent as a bystander in the face of increasing anti-Asian racism.
“ACWW has helped writers get published, and this festival is a stage for both established and new literary voices to highlight the hybridity of Canadian literary culture,” says Allan Cho, festival director. “This is not just a literary event, but a celebration that brings together writers from a range of genres to share their ideas and stories that challenge our perception and realities of writing and publishing.”

LiterASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing will take place virtually. The festival will feature six different events, including panels, workshops, book talks, and a musical performance.
Featured authors at the festival will be award-winning Anosh Irani, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Kawika Guillermo, Carlo Javier, Kevin Kapenda, Rachel D’Sa, and Nathalie De Los Santos. Workshops, book club discussions, panels, and musical performances feature Shon Wong, Winnie Cheung, David Wong, Marlene Enns, JF Garrard, Dr. Danielle Wong, and the Literary Circle of Asian Books.
LiterASIAN’s opening event will also announce the details of this year’s Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. The Award originated in 1999 to help authors of Pacific Rim Asian heritage be published with an established publishing house. Ontario author Catherine Hernandez was a previous winner for her book ‘Scarbourough’, a soon-to-be movie.
Ricepaper author interview excerpts:
Kawika Guillermo
Kawika Guillermo believes that writing is highly collaborative. He believes in it so much that he sees his identity of “Kawika Guillermo” as the all-encompassing brand naming this process. The moniker is better known as the fiction writer pseudonym of Christopher Patterson, Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. As a means of situating the author within his Filipino and Hawaii-based migrant family history, “Kawika Guillermo” is also a roof representing the many souls who take part in the creation of his fiction.
Guillermo follows up his first novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, with an ethereal speculative fiction saga that encompasses a version of human history through the eyes of a forlorn lost soul searching for their soulmate throughout humanity’s tumultuous and violent existence. Entitled All Flowers Bloom.
Carlo Javier
Program schedule and tickets are available online at http://literasian.com
For interviews and photos, please contact info@literasian.com
With much gratitude, we acknowledge that our festival will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-‐Waututh peoples