It is with great sadness that we mourn the passing of Dr. Roy Miki (1942–2024). Roy was a visionary who made groundbreaking contributions to the field of Canadian literature and helped shape some of the pressing debates of our time. He will be remembered as a brilliant scholar and poet, a committed activist on behalf of racialized communities, a courageous public intellectual, and, above all, a generous, kind, and beloved teacher and mentor.
Roy made many bold interventions in Canadian literary and cultural studies, including in his roles as an organizer of the Writing Thru Race conference; chairman of the Racial Minority Writers’ Committee of the Writers’ Union of Canada; co-chair (with Smaro Kamboureli) of the inaugural TransCanadas conference; founder of the journal Line, which later merged with West Coast Review to become the journal West Coast Line, which Roy edited; and a driving force behind the establishing of SFU’s Writer-in-Residence program. These projects offered critical and creative critiques of institutions and fields, with their exclusionary practices and foundations, and made space for previously excluded Canadian communities grounded in principles of social justice and creative practice.
Roy was a founding figure in the field of Asian Canadian studies who influenced generations of thinkers with his articles and monographs, including Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, and Writing (1998) and In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011). During the 1980s, he was a member of the negotiating team from the National Association of Japanese Canadians, which reached a landmark redress agreement with the Canadian government; he chronicled this process in Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (2004). In addition to numerous works of criticism and scholarship, Roy published six books of poetry, including a collected edition of his works, Flow (2018). Among his many awards and honours, he was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award for Surrender (2001), and he was appointed to the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada. Roy also had a long teaching career at Simon Fraser University, where he trained a generation of critics and writers in Canadian literature, Asian Canadian studies, and contemporary literature.
Roy published an article entitled “Global Drift: Thinking the Beyond of Identity Politics” in Canadian Literature as part of a special issue on Asian Canadian studies (issue 199, 2008), guest edited by Guy Beauregard. His writing also appears in a collectively authored epilogue to that issue. “After Redress: A Conversation with Roy Miki” is an interview with Roy by Guy Beauregard (issue 201, 2009). In addition, two of Roy’s poems, “Winnipeg c. 1950” and “on the sublime,” appear in another special issue on Asian Canadian writing, guest edited by Glenn Deer (issue 163, 1999).
Please also see this piece by our poetry editor, Phinder Dulai, written in memory of Roy and published in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.