Three bold writers explore how contemporary life is shaped by technology, politics, and systems of power.
Kawika Guillermo’s Of Floating Isles moves through gaming culture, identity, and coming of age in shifting digital worlds.
Sung Ming Chow’s Demotopia examines the uneasy relationship between democracy and artificial intelligence, where human decision-making meets algorithmic influence.
Joanne Leow’s Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate traces memory, extraction, and the hidden human costs of oil economies.
Together, these works offer urgent and imaginative ways of understanding the present and the futures still being imagined within it.
Location: Room C400, UBC Robson Square
Type: Panel
Moderator: Todd Wong
Readers: Kawika Guillermo, Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games. (Arsenal Pulp Press) | Sung Ming Chow, Demotopia: An Exploration of Democracy and Artificial Intelligence (Electromagnetic Print) | Joanne Leow, Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate (Penguin Random House Canada)
About The Moderator
Todd Wong
Todd is well known for his community activism and contributions to both the literary and Asian Canadian cultural community, as leaders for Historic Joy Kogawa House, Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop and Word Vancouver. But he is not well known as survivors of cancer, depression, and heart failure, although he has shared publicly in the CBC TV documentary The Chan Legacy, and interviews about cancer survivorship. Todd is a longtime library assistant for the Vancouver Public Library. In his spare time he enjoys life by playing his accordion, paddling canoes, paddle board & dragon boat (retired), drinking whisky, and creating cultural fusion fun through his Gung Haggis Fat Choy events.
About The Readers
Kawika Guillermo
Christopher Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author and a queer, neurodivergent Filipinx American. Their debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award and was adapted into the video game Stamped: an anti-travel game. Their follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom, won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Their prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, was a Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Their creative non-fiction book, Of Floating Isles: on growing pains and video games, mixes memoir with cultural commentary and game analysis. Kawika publishes academic work under their patrilineal name, Christopher B. Patterson, where they work as Professor of Social Justice at The University of British Columbia. Their books make up the award-winning transpacific empire trilogy, which include Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, and Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination. In 2024, they co-edited the anthologies Transpacific, Undisciplined, and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us.
Sung Ming Chow
Dr. Sung Ming Chow, specialised in sociology and social history, was a social activist and university lecturer back in Hong Kong, relocated to Vancouver, BC recently. His previous nonfiction publications include: The Coming of Post-employment Society (2018); Dystopia: from Smart Revolution to Post-human Future (2022); Catastrophe and Reconstruction: Human Future under the Impact of ChatGPT (2023), form the “Smart Revolution Trilogy” (all in Chinese). They attempt to argue not technology, but power and resource distribution, is the key to future of human civilisation.
