Angela May
Angela is a mixed (white/non-white) Japanese Canadian scholar, writer, community activist, and artist. She grew up on the west coast of British Columbia (as a child, in Vancouver; as a teenager, in Tsawwassen; and as a young adult, in Victoria). Angela has been shaped profoundly by all of these places—to such an extent that across all of her scholarly, literary, activist, and artistic work, Angela frequently examines place itself.
More specifically, Angela’s work explores Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. While the focus of her work is often *not* Japanese Canadians, her work is nevertheless inspired by one of her Japanese Canadian ancestors: her great grandmother, Kime Belcher. In 1942, Kime resisted forced removal by the RCMP. Thus, while roughly 22,000 Japanese Canadians were uprooted from their homes along the coast, Kime managed to stay in her home, in Ferrera Court, at the corner of Hastings and Jackson, in the neighbourhood we now know as the Downtown Eastside. For this reason, Angela’s work sits in the intersection between loss, displacement, and violence, on the one hand, and political resistance, on the other hand.
Angela’s first major public artwork, a creative video called dear community, interrogated the politics of Japanese Canadian presence and commemoration in Vancouver’s historic Powell Street neighbourhood (Paueru). Her current project (which she is pursuing in addition to her studies as a PhD Student) is a collection of linked short stories about tenant organizing, tentatively titled Hotel Blue.
Angela holds a BA in English (University of Victoria), an MA in Socio-Cultural Studies of Health (Queen's University), a Creative Writing Certificate (Simon Fraser University), and is currently a PhD Student working under the supervision of Dr. Amber Dean in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.
Angela’s writing has been published in The Volcano, The Bulletin / Geppo, Nikkei Images, emerge20, and other online forums. Four new poems (including one about Redress) are pending publication in an upcoming anthology.
t: @angelamayyyy
i: @paperandplot