Born in Vancouver, Kim Fu, a Creative Writing graduate from UBC, has set her gender-bending first novel For Today I Am a Boy (HarperCollins, 2014) in a small town in Ontario to heighten the pressures already felt by her protagonist, Peter Huang, the only son born to a traditional Chinese family. Feeling he ought to have been born female, Peter is deeply estranged from his Chinese name, Juan Chaun, meaning powerful king, as he endures bullies, harsh lovers and Christian ex-gays. Peter and his three sisters, Adele, Helen and Bonnie, all flee to less suffocating lives in Montreal, California and Berlin. The novel was launched at the Wise Hall in Vancouver on January 18, 2014 with free Quebecois food and music by Francesca Belcourt. For Today I Am a Boy was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

Kim Fu's debut poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance (Nightwood, 2016) is filled with incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence. These poems shed light on small scenes of domestic life and banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.

Fu has been published in The Atlantic, Maisonneuve, The Rumpus, Ms. Magazine, The Tyee, Prairie Fire, The Stranger, Grain, Room, and Best Canadian Essays. She is an editor for This magazine and writes the advice column ASK FU! for the YourBoxClub.com blog. She lives in Seattle.

BOOKS

For Today I Am a Boy (HarperCollins 2014)

How Festive the Ambulance (Nightwood 2016) $18.95 978-0-88971-321-5

[BCBW 2016]