The Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society would like to congratulate Fiona Tinwei Lam for being appointed Vancouver’s sixth Poet Laureate, 2022-2024. She has a deep and long-standing connection to the community including her support to VAHMS and participation in various panels and exhibitions during explorASIAN.

Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and Odes & Laments. She also authored the illustrated children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket. Her poetry and prose have been published in over forty anthologies (Canada, Hong Kong, and the US), including The Best Canadian Poetry in English (2010, 10th anniversary edition in 2017, and 2020 edition). Three of her poems have been featured on BC’s Poetry in Transit, including most recently “Z” from Odes & Laments. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the creative nonfiction anthology, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood published by McGill-Queen’s University Press with Cathy Stonehouse and Shannon Cowan, and also the editor of The Bright Well, a collection of contemporary Canadian poetry about facing cancer. She and Jane Silcott co-edited the creative 2018 nonfiction and poetry anthology, Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups & Downs of Marriage. From September 2020-21, she curated and hosted the online monthly poetry series In/Verse for the Federation of BC Writers to showcase local published poets. Her award-winning poetry videos, made in collaboration with local animators and filmmakers, have been screened at festivals locally and internationally since 2009. Learn more about her on her website: https://fionalam.net/