Amy Fung -- Book Launch
Saturday May 25 2019 7:30 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Travel Alcove
Winnipeg launch of Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (Book*hug) featuring a conversation with host Sharanpal Ruprai. Co-presented by the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.
This is the debut collection of creative nonfiction essays by Amy Fung. In it, Fung takes a closer examination at Canada’s mythologies of multiculturalism, settler colonialism, and identity through the lens of a national art critic. Join Amy and poet/scholar Sharanpal Ruprai for an evening of conversation, followed by a book signing.
Amy Fung is a writer and curator born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and spent her formative years in and around Edmonton on Treaty 6 Territory. Her multifarious curatorial projects have spanned exhibitions, cinematic and live presentations, as well as discursive events across Canada and abroad. Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being is her first book.
Sharanpal Ruprai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Sharanpal Ruprai’s début poetry collection, Seva, was a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry by the Alberta Literary Awards. Pressure Cooker Love Bomb is her second collection of poetry.
See:
Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being
- Amy Fung 
Trade paperback
$20.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $18.00
In that moment, I felt closer to whiteness than not. I was completely complicit and didn?t think twice about entering a space that could cover their walls with images of contemporary Indigenous perspectives, but exclude their physical bodies from entering and experiencing. In that moment, I felt like a real Canadian.
Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being is the debut collection of nonfiction essays by Amy Fung. In it, Fung takes a closer examination at Canada's mythologies of multiculturalism, settler colonialism, and identity through the lens of a national art critic.Following the tangents of a foreign-born perspective and the complexities and complicities in participating in ongoing acts of colonial violence, the book as a whole takes the form of a very long land acknowledgement. Taken individually, each essay roots itself in the learning and unlearning process of a first generation settler immigrant as she unfurls each region's sense of place and identity
Praise for Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being:
?The hours I've spent with this knowing and moving book about place and placelessness are among the most valuable of my reading life. Wow, thank you, Amy." --Eileen Myles
"As an Indigenous/Haudenosaunee writer and reader, I recognize that Amy Fung's book does not try to convince us that she is a native rights ally but shows us with language how to mould the term ally into a verb." --Janet Rogers, author of Totem Poles and Railroads
"In this compelling work, Amy Fung breathes life and relevance into criticality. This visitor's guide is integral reading." --Cecily Nicholson, author of Wayside Sang, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry.
Pressure Cooker Love Bomb
- Sharanpal Ruprai
Trade paperback
$19.95 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $17.96
Poems masquerading as recipes, poems masquerading as survival guides, poems simmered in love, Pressure Cooker Love Bomb is a humorous collection of poems. Ruprai's second collection is infused with intense sexuality, racial tensions, and questions of gender conformity. With various textures of poems, the collection reads as woman of colour's manifesto with instructions.
