BA (Hons), MFA
Instructor, English
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
School of Humanities
English
604.986.1911 ext. 3558
Fir Building, room FR 454
xiaoxuanhuang@capilanou.ca
Education
MFA, Creative Writing, University of British Columbia (Okanagan), 2022.
BA (Honours), English Language and Literature, Queen's University, 2014.
"Whatever the work may be, it must be intersectional. We must materialize relationalities predicated on consideration, multiplicity, and tender attendance."
Bio
Xiaoxuan Huang (MFA, University of British Columbia, 2022) is a writer, scholar and educator working in experimental criticism, literary audio and other forms of hybrid poetics.
Her writing lingers in the doorway like a long goodbye, aiming to be what it claims to need: "A book [that] is always-already a sign of love. A sign for love."
Her first full-length publication, Love Speech (2019, Metatron Press) is a book of poetry & auto-theory. She recently completed a manuscript of lyric epistles, All the Time, which was listed as a finalist for the 2023 Fonograf Editions Essay Collection Contest.
Her present manuscript-in-progress, Venus in its Fall, has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council; it is a lyric autofiction novel that spans a decade in the life of an itinerant 1.5 generation Shanghainese-Canadian.
Following Sarah Ahmed's framing of literary positionality as a literal concept of orientation, our social and cultural backgrounds help determine what we can afford to turn our attention towards, and how we interpret meaning from what we are faced with.
No two readings will be the same across individuals, nor will one individual have the same reading twice; it's important to interrogate what that means with compassion and respect for the familiar as well as the unknown.
Whether I am teaching a foundational course in English composition, or an upper-year poetry seminar, my goal is to help students find a distinct voice by grounding their critical perspectives in their own positionality as readers and writers.
I'm excited by rhizomatic research practices where creative, critical, and performative ways of being meet.
Some of my particular areas of interest are: literary aurality, auto-theory, hybrid poetics, and non-thetic representations of queer intimacies. I embrace modes of scholarly and artistic presentation that allow me to get as close to words as possible.
Whatever the work may be, it must be intersectional. We must materialize relationalities predicated on consideration, multiplicity, and tender attendance.
Book-Length Publications
- Huang, Xiaoxuan. Love Speech. Montreal, Metatron Press, 2019.
Selected Conferences
- Huang, Xiaoxuan. "the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.” Reverb: Echo-locations of Sound and Space, SpokenWeb Symposium, 1 May 2023, University of Alberta Digital Scholarship Centre, Edmonton, AB. Exhibition.
- Huang, Xiaoxuan. "All the Time: Co-Writing Queer Diachronic Time with Theory & Poetry." Poetic Technique as Critical Method, ACCUTE Conference, 6 May 2022, Alt Hotel, Montreal, QC. Panel Presentation.
- Huang, Xiaoxuan. "A Vectored Gaze: Lyric Fragments and Oblique Reading." Poetics of The Fragment, Centre for Expanded Poetics, 13 June 2021, Concordia University, Montreal, QC. Panel Presentation.
- Huang, Xiaoxuan. "Not Making a Move: Reticence in Queer Love." Academia, Activism, and Art, Queer Coll(i/u)sions Conference, 4 March 2017, Sadlier House Community and Student Centre, Peterborough, ON. Panel Presentation.
Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant, 2023.
British Columbia Arts Council Individual Arts Award, 2023.
Al Purdy Writer-in-Residency Program, 2023.
Shortlisted, Fonograf Editions Essay Collection Contest, 2023.
Shortlisted, John Lent Poetry & Prose Award, 2022.