Mercedes Eng

Mercedes Eng is a Canadian writer, poet and educator based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her poetry books are Mercenary English, yt mama (2020), and Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (2017). Eng's poetic work considers themes such as race relations and socioeconomics. In 2018 she won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Early life and education Eng was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta. She is of mixed (white- and Chinese-Canadian) heritage, which she explores in her 2020 book my yt mama among other works.

Publications February 2010 (2010) - Chapbook Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (2017) - Book

Eng’s own word sections include poetry involving her and her family’s personal experiences with having an incarcerated family member, and a character named Carole who appears multiple times and is based on someone Eng met when she visited her father. Eng critiques the ways in which carceral records construct and often control histories of marginalized communities, aligning with scholarship that values the family archive’s role in defining public and private heritage. The book also intersects with discussions of personal and communal memory, emphasizing how state-maintained records can obscure or distort lived experiences. Eng emphasizes archival materials and their origins, focusing not only on prison records housed in colonial archives, contending that their bureaucratic nature regulates and constrain prisoners' identities, but also her own personal artifacts that challenge institutional legitimacy. By foregrounding the archival logic of documentation, Eng challenges readers to consider whose stories are preserved and whose are erased. This methodology aligns with broader archival theory, which questions how records serve as instruments of both memory and marginalization in societal power structures. Through poetic engagement with these records, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes ultimately reframes archives as contested sites where personal histories clash with institutional narratives.