Content warning: Violent and disturbing imagery, not suitable for younger students.

Vancouver born Chinese-Canadian poet Evelyn Lau is no stranger to suffering. Although she found early successes in writing (she was first published at age 12), her traditionally minded parents were unsupportive of her creative pursuits, wanting her to be a doctor. Her deeply unhappy relationship with her family and social isolation at school led Lau to run away from home at age 14. She spent the next few years homeless, addicted to drugs, frequently suicidal and supporting herself through prostitution. In the end, writing was her salvation as her first book 'Runaway: Diary of street kid' became a bestseller. In her poem 'Remembrance Day', Lau transports us into an uncomfortable moment of silence at Winners on a dark, soggy November day ("the sky has swallowed all the light"), in which the distant realities of war are brought into vivid and horrific focus through the memory of a street urchin's dark fate. Ms. Lau's own experiences with homelessness lend further weight to the shattering climax of this piece. In her book of autobiographical essays 'Inside Out', Lau writes: "There has always been this strange urgent need in me to make the private public, to turn things inside out so that what typically lives hidden in darkness is exposed to the light." Evelyn Lau was the city of Vancouver's poet Laureate from 2011-2014. She has won numerous litarary awards, and been nominated for a Governor General's Award. She has also worked as Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen University and Vancouver Community College, and was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Calgary. How has your life experience influenced your writing? This remembrance day, can you find a personal connection to the themes of war and peace, darkness and light, and channel that connection onto the page?