Bio
Roy Miki is a Vancouver-based poet and critic, well-known for his award-winning poetry, literary criticism, theoretical texts, editorial work, as well as for his activist work as part of the Redress movement in the 1980s. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Governor General’s award-winning Surrender (2001), the documentary text, co-authored with Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (1991), the memoir/chronicle Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (2004), and numerous critical texts such as In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011). His editorial work includes the crucial Japanese Canadian text This is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948, a collection of Muriel Kitagawa’s published and unpublished writings; Pacific Windows: The Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka; and The Artist and the Moose: A Fable of Forget (2009), by Roy K. Kiyooka.
Miki was born in Winnipeg in 1942, mere months after his family’s forced removal from their farm in Haney, British Columbia to the sugar beet fields of Ste. Agathe, Manitoba. This background led him to become one of the spokespeople for the Redress movement in the 1980s; he served on the Strategy Committee of the NAJC. His scholarly work focusses on North American modernist and contemporary literature, with particular emphasis on the critical and creative implications of anti-racist theory, cultural studies, poetics, Canadian literature, minority literature, and Asian Canadian cultural production. While his creative and scholarly contributions to Japanese Canadian writing can hardly be overstated, his work cannot and should not be reduced to this one part of an interconnected oeuvre. He is a professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, where he taught from the mid-1970s until 2007, and a recipient of both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.
