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In the late 1980s, Rita Wong was part of a group of students who petitioned the University of �����о���’s department of English to create one of its first women’s literature courses.

At the time, courses that centered women writers and writers of colour were still rare. For Wong and her peers, expanding the curriculum was a way of creating space for voices that had long been absent from the classroom.

Growing up in ������� in the 1980s, Wong had rarely encountered Asian Canadian voices in the books she studied.

“That absence was very normal,” she recalls. “But it was also painful.”

That early effort to reshape what students read and whose stories were included would foreshadow the work Wong would go on to do as a poet, scholar and educator whose writing explores the intersections of literature, social justice and the natural world.

Yet when Wong first began sharing her own poetry in university classrooms, she was far from the confident public voice she would later become.

“I was very shy and very quiet,” she says. “I would say my poems and nobody could hear what I was saying.”

One day, her instructor, poet Fred Wah, asked her to stand in the hallway and read her poem loudly enough for him to hear from outside the classroom.

“I was so angry at being put on the spot,” she recalls. “But it broke some kind of internal censor I had.”

That moment at the University of ������� helped Wong find the voice that would eventually carry her into a distinguished career in poetry and scholarship.

Discovering English at U�������

Wong grew up in ������� and entered the University of ������� in the mid-1980s without a declared major. At the time, many students began their studies in general studies, exploring a range of disciplines before deciding on a path.

For Wong, that path soon became clear.

“I realized English was a good fit because I loved to read and I got a lot out of writing,” she says.

Encouragement from professor Mary Ann Gillies, now retired, helped affirm that instinct. The intellectual atmosphere of the department of English, then located in Craigie Hall, also played an important role in shaping her experience.

Honours students shared a dedicated room in the building, a space where they could gather to study, exchange ideas, and spend time together outside the classroom. “It was a place to hang out and meet other students and work on assignments,” Wong recalls.

The sense of intellectual community she found there became foundational to her development as a writer.

Writing in Community

Outside the classroom, Wong became deeply involved in student literary culture on campus. She contributed to Pros and Cons, an undergraduate English students’ publication, and worked with Sanskrit, a student literary journal that published creative writing from across the university. Through these projects, students solicited submissions, edited works, and circulated new writing within the campus community.

Creative writing courses also played a pivotal role in Wong’s development. She studied with poet Fred Wah and writer Christopher Wiseman, experiences she describes as transformative. “It was a place to work out coming to voice,” she says.

Expanding the Stories We Tell

During her honours year, Wong wrote her thesis on The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston under the supervision of professor Jeanne Perreault. The course Perreault taught on American women of colour literature opened new intellectual possibilities.

“It really opened up the world to me,” Wong says.

For her, encountering those texts helped articulate a feeling she had long carried as a reader. Growing up in ������� in the 1980s, she rarely encountered Asian Canadian voices in the books she studied.

Writing, she realized, could help address the absence. “I started writing because I needed to hear voices that weren’t present in what I was reading.”

One of the most powerful moments of recognition came when she watched the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club.

“I remember sitting in the theatre and just crying,” she says. “I realized I hadn’t really seen Asian North American people represented like that before.”

A Career in Poetry and Scholarship

After graduating from U�����о��� with an honours BA in English in 1990, Wong continued her academic journey, earning a master’s degree in English from the University of Alberta, a second master’s in archival studies from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD from Simon Fraser University.

She went on to become an influential poet and scholar. Wong is the author of multiple poetry collections, including monkeypuzzle (1998), forage (2007), and undercurrent (2015). Her work examines the intersections of ecology, social justice, and decolonization, often drawing attention to the relationships between people and the environments they inhabit.

Today, Wong is an associate professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, where she has lived for more than three decades. Her teaching includes courses exploring ecological thinking and cross-cultural perspectives on water and environmental stewardship.

In 2024, she received the prestigious Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, recognizing her significant contribution to Canadian poetry.

Looking back, Wong sees her undergraduate years as a time when intellectual discovery and collective action often went hand in hand. As a student, she participated in protests against tuition increases and joined classmates in advocating for new areas of study within the curriculum.

Those experiences shaped how she thinks about community today. “I would encourage students to think about what you can achieve together that you cannot achieve alone,” she says.

Writing may be a solitary practice, she notes, but creative and intellectual growth often depends on supportive networks of people who share ideas and work toward common goals.

“Where are your people?” she asks. “And how can you take care of each other?”

Listening to the World Around Us

For Wong, literature ultimately offers more than artistic expression. It provides a way to understand relationships between people, communities, and the environments that sustain them.

“At the heart of what it means to be human,” she says, “is that we’re relational.”

The lessons she began learning as a student at the University of �������, reading widely, listening carefully, and building community, continue to guide her work today.

Through poetry, teaching, and public engagement, Wong remains committed to amplifying voices, telling new stories, and reminding readers that the worlds of language, land, and community are deeply connected.