collier nogues

In collaboration with poets Jhave Johnston and Mei Kwan Ng and programmer Leoson Cheong, I developed a bilingual Cantonese/English digital poetry installation for the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media's immersive 360º theater. CURVED interrogates Hong Kong’s Basic Law in the wake of 2014’s Umbrella Movement. My contributions drew on classical Chinese poetry and rearrangements of the Basic Law’s language, and foregrounded collaborative work produced by students in the writing workshops I led as Writer-in-Residence at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University. The project launched in June 2016. In July 2020, the literary journal TIMBER published a feature on CURVED. I’ve included here a one-minute montage of the June 2016 version, as well as two early tests for the project: a "tunnel" of Chinese characters, and an erasure of Hong Kong's Basic Law in both English and Chinese.

Container Press commissioned me to transform a 500-card Rolodex into an artwork as part of their Multitudes series of innovative artists’ books. Other artists included M. NourbeSe Philip, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and Michael Leong.

The result, Miniature Perimeter, maps Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base perimeter fence onto the Rolodex’s spinnable, cylindrical form. Each spread of Rolodex cards is a matched set of images: the view into and out from the fence at the same point along the perimeter. Miniature Perimeter invites you to circumnavigate the base, whose entirety is contained within this Rolodex, as I did in December of 2016. For more details, visit Container.

The artwork is now in the collection of The Institute for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

An interactive essay emerged out of the same circumnavigatory walk, and was published at Territory.

SHOPPETTE is a manuscript-in-progress of interactive lyric essays, photography, and poems. I named it after the 24-hour convenience stores common on overseas US military bases. The book explores the peculiar militarized suburbia exported around the world by American armed forces, and the ecological, economic, and social consequences for the people living on- and off-base. Here’s an excerpt.

I’m an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I teach undergraduate and MA creative writing and literature courses. I also supervise PhD students working on critical and creative dissertations, and MA students writing creative thesis projects. Here in HK, I've also taught at the University of Hong Kong, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Education University of Hong Kong. Before moving here I was a lecturer at UC Irvine.

Aside from college-level instruction, I teach pedagogical workshops for primary and secondary teachers seeking ways to incorporate creative writing into English classrooms. I am also a consultant for the Hong Kong Education Bureau, which has featured my poetry teaching in instructional videos for its Educational TV channel, and I run poetry and creative technology workshops for school-age students.

If you'd like to know more, or would like to talk about developing courses or community programs, email me.

I conduct poetry outreach activities for students and educators at all levels in Hong Kong.

Most recently, I led a project training undergraduate students to create VR lesson plans using EduVenture-VR, an educational platform developed by the Center for Learning Sciences and Technologies here at CUHK. We then conducted lessons at five schools for over 100 students in total, aiming to make studying poems for the required DSEs less scary and more fun.

I’ve also led Professional Development Programs for tertiary colleagues at the Education University of Hong Kong, and for secondary school teachers through the HKSAR Education Bureau.

I regularly deliver keynotes for secondary school Reading Festival Week events, judge school creative writing competitions, and conduct creative writing workshops for primary and secondary students, often in partnership with the Cha Writing Workshop Series.

I’ve also designed classroom materials for Nicholas Wong’s pedagogical initiative, Writing Plus, and for the community reading project One City One Book Hong Kong.

To talk about how we can bring poetry into more public school classrooms and communities beyond schools, get in touch.