Events › Kawika Guillermo: Of Floating Isles

"A mind-blowing odyssey through the 'person-shaping' world of gaming." - Kyo Macear

Of Floating Isles is a new collection of essays by Kawika Guillermo, on their lifelong attachment to video games and the role they play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, the author explores the influence of video games in shaping their identity, and reframes gaming as a quest for a different community, where people can feel seen, heard, and understood.

Kawika Guillermo will appear in conversation with Nathalie De Los Santos. 

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Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author and third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. They have lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and Vancouver, Canada. Their debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel (2018), won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, and in 2023 was adapted into a free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game. Their follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom (2020), won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Their first prose-poetry book, Nimrods (2023) was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction.

Nathalie De Los Santos is a writer and creative. She created PilipinxPages, a platform that features Filipinx authors. She was a fellow of the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, where she workshopped her YA fantasy novel Diyosa Mata under the tutelage of Aiden Thomas. Her short story Bakunawa and the Seven Sisters was shortlisted by Fractured Lit, and her novel Debt of the Heart was longlisted by Anvil Press. She is one of the key organizers of the Filipino-Canadian Book Festival. Her publications appear in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, The Globe and Mail, SAD Magazine, and more. She also hosts the Filipino Fairy Tales, Mythology, and Folklore podcast.

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Accessibility: VPL is committed to making our programs accessible for all. If you have an access need that we have not addressed here, please email us at programs@vpl.ca.

• Level 8 is accessible via the main elevators 
• The Montalbano Family Theatre has three wheelchair accessible spaces in the front row
• The theatre offers cinema-style seating, with limited space between seats. 

For more information on physical access, view the Accessibility information on the Central Library page.