Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li is a queer first-generation immigrant Chinese-Canadian writer, editor, musician, director, emerging filmmaker, playwright, photographer, aspiring actor, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You (845 Press, 2022). Her fiction and/or poetry can be found in The New Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, League of Canadian Poets Anthology: In the Storm/Struggle, The Fiddlehead, filling station, CV2, and Vallum, among others. She was recently a Finalist for the The Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Shortlisted for Federation of BC Writers Literary Contests – Flash Fiction, received Honorable Mentions from Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize, and Shortlisted for the Vancouver City Poems Contest. Her past acting/ playwright credits include Little Women (UBC Players Club) and Guitar Strings (Green College Players; Coffeehouse Theatre Society; Festival Dionysia). She was also a director at Brave New Play Rites Festival and Or Festival. Her screenwriting, directorial, and producer debut for her short musical dramedy, In Silence, We Sing, premiered at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival 2022. She is currently the co-host of PRISM Presents… a monthly podcast/ radio show featuring readings and interviews from PRISM International’s pages, contest judges, as well as faculty and students from the UBC Creative Writing Program.
In her free time, she enjoys taking nature walks, drawing, creating worlds, coding, learning engineering concepts, proposing inventions, and engaging with new ideas. Her passion is creation and co-creation between artists, collaborators, and communities. An MFA candidate at UBC School of Creative Writing, she is currently Editor for PRISM international and Augur, and can be reached on Twitter and Instagram @vivianlicreates.
She is currently a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, League of Canadian Poets, Women in Film and Television, and Federation of BC Writers.
Find some of her creative works/ projects here.
Editing
She has edited for over twelve Canadian/ international journals and/or publications. She is currently an Editor for Augur as well as Prose Editor for PRISM international, and has edited for The Goose: an annual review of short fiction, IDIOM: U of T’s English Undergraduate Journal, Acta Victoriana, The Spectatorial, and Almagest: Undergraduate Journal in the History and Philosophy of Sciences. She has also written and edited for The Window Magazine, written for DEMO Magazine, curated works for Young Voices Magazine, and edited for Pensées Canadiennes: the Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy. She also served as an Associate-Editor-in-Chief of IDIOM, and Assistant-Editor-in-Chief for The Window Magazine.