Settle

A digital native and an actual immigrant, poet Theresa Munoz has considerable personal experience of two subjects that dominate the present day: migration and technology. Born in Canada, she came to Scotland to work and study. Her journey echoed that of her parents, Filipinos who migrated separately from the Philippines in 1970, meeting in Toronto where they worked hard to build new lives. The first of these two sequences of poems, "Settle", reflects her family's experience of emigration over several generations. Although she writes of racism and homesickness, her journey has been a happy one and she has a positive take on uprooting herself and settling in another country. The second sequence, "Digital Life", looks at technology through the eyes of someone who grew up as part of the Facebook generation. Whilst she's an immigrant in the real world, Munoz is very much at home online.She finds humour and melancholy in her interactions with Google, Facebook, mobile phones and email, whether it be the frustration felt waiting for someone to text back, the highly stylised way people present themselves on Facebook, or an oddly empathetic relationship with the unvisited twentieth page of a Google search.

"Theresa Munoz writes with a questioning clarity, a precise observation of the material world undercut by doubts and feelings of impermanence. A sense of movement - whether of migration or language or light - runs through her poems. She has a fresh and engaging take on living in a constantly shifting world." - James Robertson, poet and novelist

Theresa Munoz was born in Vancouver to Filipino parents and now makes her home in Edinburgh. She holds a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow where she was Overseas Research Scholar and wrote the first doctoral thesis on the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard. Her work has appeared in several journals in both Canada and the United Kingdom, including in Canadian Literature, The Poetry Review and Best Scottish Poems. She has been shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and has been a prizewinner in the McLellan and Troubadour competitions. She is a regular contributor to the Scottish Review of Books and the Herald's book pages, and is the author of the pamphlet Close (HappenStance Press, 2012). She works as a university tutor and a researcher in digital poetics and Scotlit.