You Are Not Who You Claim

Brief Description: Strong, intimate, disturbing and finally poignant, Evelyn Laus poems are about people, trapped and hurting behind their many masks of conformity. Biographical Note: Evelyn Lau has been publishing poetry and prose since she was thirteen. Now eighteen, she has her poetry appear in "Prism International," "Queen's Quarterly" and "Canadian Author and Bookman," among other literary magazines. Her prose has been published in "MacLean's," "Vancouver Magazine" and "The Antigonish Review." And she has won six awards for her poetry. For two years, Evelyn lived on "the streets" in a world of drugs and prostitution recording these experiences in a journal. She left the streets in 1988 at the age of seventeen and extracts from this journal became the best-selling "Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid," which stayed on bestseller lists across Canada for months. Evelyn is now a freelance writer for the "Province" and the "Globe and Mail" as well as working on a collection of short stories. She lives in Vancouver.

Contributor Bio:  Lau, Evelyn EVELYN LAU was born in Vancouver in 1971. She is the author of Fresh Girls and Other Stories, Other Women and Choose Me; and three collections of poetry: You Are Not Who You Claim, which won the Milton Acorn Memorial People s Poetry Award; Oedipal Dreams, which was nominated for the Governor General s Award for Poetry; and In the House of Slaves. Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid was made into a TV movie in 1994. Evelyn Lau lives in Vancouver.