Julia Escaño is a Filipino immigrant residing in unceded Coast Salish territory now known as Vancouver, Canada. She has degrees in Visual Communication from the University of the Philippines and Creative Writing from the University of British of Columbia. As a new member of the diaspora, she explores themes of immigration, identity, and belonging, and how these weave into a global, postcolonial society. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Ricepaper and Grain, and is forthcoming in Prairie Fire. By day, she works as a copywriter for a Vancouver tech company and lives by the rules of her 8-month-old wiener dog, Napoleon.

Artist Statement: Immigration is not a mere act of moving from point A to point B. Immigration is a constant journey: an exploration of spaces and places, how these influence and interact with ever-evolving selves. It’s a cycle of interrogation and discovery, of finding one’s place in things despite the fragmentation caused by becoming uprooted. It’s always asking “Who am I? Who was I? Who am I here? What am I now?” and then probing deeper until one sees hints of their very first origins, until they can make sense of its basest shape and its new form in the new world it inhabits.

These poems are me digging, comprehending, digging some more, and maybe accepting—to an extent—the self that I have uncovered this time. They are expressions of my recognition of my present shape in this new world: I am a Brown woman, I am an immigrant, and I am ready to embrace it.