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Writer-in-Residence Cody Caetano has invited award-winning author, poet, and scholar Kawika Guillermo to visit Edmonton and will host them for two events that we invite you to join us for!

"Writing Machphrasis: On the Poetic Machinations of Video Games"

In this talk, Kawika Guillermo will discuss the pleasures, potentials, and unexpected failures of writing about video games. Drawing on their recently published book, Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games, Guillermo will discuss their development of a writing style they call machphrasis: prose inspired by the machinations of video games, their universes, their puzzles, their social and physical systems of logic, their rules and boundaries, and their emotional resonances. The talk will be hosted by Writer-in-Residence Cody Caetano and be followed by time for questions and conversation. 

Event Details
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2025 
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Location: Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), 91³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏÍø

This event is free and open to the public; no registration required.

Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author of six books and a third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. Their debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, and was adapted into a free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game. Their follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom, won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Their first prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, was a Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Their most recent book, Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games, mixes stories of personal tragedy with cultural commentary and game analysis, revealing the transformative personal and political power of video games.

Kawika publishes academic work under their patrilineal/legal name, Christopher B. Patterson, where they work as Graduate Chair and Associate Professor of The Social Justice Institute at The University of British Columbia. Their research and teaching focuses on literature, video games, and new media through the lens of Asian North American studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. Their first academic book, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, won the American Studies Association’s 2020 Shelley Fishkin Prize in Transnational American Studies, and their second, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games was a finalist for both the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award, and the 2021 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. Their articles have appeared in Positions, American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Quarterly, and other venues. They are the co-editor of two anthologies published in 2024: Transpacific, Undisciplined (University of Washington Press), and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press). Their next and final sole-authored academic book, Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination, is forthcoming in March 2026 with Duke University Press.