ABOUT LIVING HYPHEN
Living Hyphen is a community that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians. From the Haitian-Quebecois commuting along the Montréal Métro to the South Asian trans man applying for permanent residency, from the young Filipino-Canadian woman texting her immigrant mother to the Plains Cree and Métis man meeting a traditional healer, we reveal the rich inner lives of Canada’s diverse communities.
We publish a magazine and host a podcast featuring the voices of artists and writers all across Canada. Some of our stories were even adapted into a stage play in downtown Toronto. Throughout the years, we’ve partnered with different organizations to produce multimedia artifacts to amplify diverse voices across multiple intersections of identity.
Our work also centres around cultural programming aimed at cultivating courageous and tender storytelling within our communities. Through writing and art, we uncover what it means to live in between cultures as individuals who call “Canada” home but with roots elsewhere. Our stories are beautiful, heartbreaking, uplifting, contradictory, and constantly unfolding.
OUR aim is to reshape the mainstream and to turn up the volume on voices that often go unheard.
Our Origin Story
The seed of Living Hyphen as an idea was born in the fall of 2015 at Toronto’s Feminist Art Conference when our founder, Justine Abigail Yu, attended a panel about (the lack of) diversity in Canadian literature. The panel was stacked with writers of colour with experience to share about the publishing industry. She listened to these panelists — all writers of color — talk about the difficulties they faced in getting their work published, simply because their stories did not conform to the “Canadian narrative”. Either that or their stories were not “ethnic” enough.
As a writer and as a woman of colour, this deeply unsettled Justine.
After that panel, she spent the next few weeks (years, really) ravenous for art and literature that complicated that “Canadian narrative”, and that better represented her life experiences. There were some gems out there, but they were few and far between. Her eyes were suddenly opened to just how White-dominated Canada’s arts and literature scene was (is).
From there, the seed of Living Hyphen had sprouted.
About Our Founder: Justine Abigail Yu
Justine Abigail (she/her) was born in Manila, Philippines and moved to what we now know as Toronto, Canada when she was just four years old. Growing up, she often felt like she was in the middle of a constant tug of war, an ongoing push and pull of these two places, two cultures, two identities. In short, she describes her life as one of living in between, of living in the hyphen.
That’s ultimately what led her down this path of building Living Hyphen as a community. Today, she is an award-winning workshop facilitator whose work has been featured on national, and local media outlets including the Globe & Mail, CTV National News, and the CBC. She was also named a “Changemaker” by the Toronto Star in October 2021.
Justine Abigail is a fierce advocate for equity and anti-oppression. Her mission is to stir the conscience and spur social change. Learn more about Justine’s work at www.justineabigail.com.
In the News
“In 2018 [Justine Abigail Yu] launched Living Hyphen — a literary community and multimedia platform that celebrates the diverse stories of hyphenated Canadians...
Since then, things have taken off, with a podcast, a stage play, an upcoming third issue as well as ongoing cross-country cultural programming and training for students and interested Canadians.
Through short stories, photography, poetry and illustrations, the journal shares intimate human experiences tied to migration, immigration, displacement and settlement exploring ideas around connection to a homeland, ties to past generations, and finding a sense of self somewhere new.”
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