Pacific Rim Letters is a never-before-seen collection of letters Roy Kiyooka wrote between 1975 and 1985. It presents a fascinating and highly valuable picture of the artistic and literary communities Kiyooka was actively involved with, as well as Kiyooka as a man with an extraordinary intellect and passion for life and the arts. Kiyooka takes the epistolary form into new and radical directions. At once tenderly estranged and confessional, attentive as much to the minutiae of daily life as to the complexities of artistic and literary creation, and embedded in the politics of culture-making and those of racialized identities, these letters are a literary achievement in their own right.

Roy Kiyooka (1926–1994) was a painter, poet, photographer, and arts teacher. A second generation Japanese Canadian, he was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926, grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and died in Vancouver, B.C. in 1994. He was one of Canada’s first “multi-disciplinary” artists, and the subject of several important exhibitions during his lifetime. His visual artwork included paintings, sculpture, film, and photographs. During his career he taught at a number of universities, including the University of British Columbia. Kiyooka was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978.

Roy Kiyooka's profile page

Smaro Kamboureli is Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph. Her publications include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize, and, with Roy Miki, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2007). She is currently completing a new edition of her anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature.

Robert Zacharias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests include migration literature, Canadian literature (with a focus on Mennonite literature), 18th-century studies, and critical pedagogy. His work has been published in Mosaic and Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in the edited collections Embracing Otherness and Narratives of Citizenship.

Smaro Kamboureli's profile page