Our New Voices authors offer powerful portraits of youth navigating upheaval and longing. Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho’s memoir The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street traces a Taiwanese-Canadian family fractured across continents, while Iryn Tushabe’s novel Everything Is Fine Here follows a Ugandan teen confronting her sister’s forbidden love—each illuminating profound resilience and hope. This event is moderated by Megan Cole.
Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho has published short stories and personal essays in PRISM international, Ricepaper Magazine, River Teeth, Room and several anthologies, and was a finalist for the 2021 Jim Wong-Chu Award for Emerging Writers (presented by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop). She lives in North Vancouver, BC, with her family. The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street is her first book.
Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan Canadian writer and journalist living on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan. Most recently her nonfiction has appeared in Literary Hub, The Walrus and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories volumes 30 and 33. She was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and is a 2023 winner of the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Everything is Fine Here is her debut novel.
Megan Cole is an artist of too many projects. She’s an amateur drummer, dabbler in alternative photography, fibre artist, and writer. She believes she has one of the best jobs as the Executive Director for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. Her role includes hosting and producing a weekly podcast, and she’s interviewed authors such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Michelle Good, Joel Bakan, and more. Megan lives in qathet on the territory of the Tla’amin Nation.
https://megancolewriter.com/my-work/
