Mercedes Eng reads from COP CITY SWAGGER / A community conversation on policing, gentrification, and Chinatowns
aiya哎呀 collective and Paper Birch Books are pleased to welcome poet Mercedes Eng for a community conversation on gentrification, policing, colonialism, and alternatives to these forms of structural violence in Chinatown(s) & the inner city, interspersed with readings from Mercedes' latest book, cop city swagger.
As part of this event, we'll be collecting donations for Tawâw Outreach Collective. If you're able, you can bring items like: hats, scarves, gloves, socks, underwear, hygiene items, non-perishables, $5 gift cards, or a cash donation.
Thank you to Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jordan Abel at the University of Alberta for bringing Mercedes to town, and to Mercedes for requesting a community-oriented event as part of her visit. And thanks to the City of Edmonton for funding associated with this event.
About cop city swagger: Investigating whose safety really matters in the most expensive city in the nation, cop city swagger conducts a threat assessment of Vancouver’s police. Holding close lived and living connections to the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods, Eng juxtaposes the police’s and the city’s institutional rhetoric with their acts of violence against marginalized people, presenting a panoramic media montage of structural harm and community care.
About Mercedes Eng: Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ. She is the author of my yt mama, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and Mercenary English. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, The Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release). Mercedes was recently the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.