Mercedes Eng

“One of the most studied and visionary writers in Canada today.”
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Capilano Review

Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Territories. Eng’s creative practice combines teaching in classrooms and on the ground, experiential knowledge, community organizing, independent study, and a hybrid poetics that deploys multiple forms of language from theory to memoir to historical and official state documents to art and photography. She is the author of Mercenary English, a long poem about sex work, violence, and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and my yt mama. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release).

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes