2021 JURORS
Jordan Abel
is a Nisga’a writer who lives in Edmonton. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s latest project NISHGA (McClelland & Stewart, 2021) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel recently completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing.
Marie-Andrée Gill
est Pekuakamishkueu (Ilnue du Lac-St-Jean, communauté de Mashteuiatsh, Québec). Autrice, poète, animatrice de balados décolonisants ( Laisser nous raconter : l’histoire crochie, Les mots de Joséphine ), elle est aussi étudiante au doctorat en lettres à l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Elle a terminé un mémoire de maitrise portant sur la décolonisation par l’écriture de l’intime et le rapport au territoire ancestral. Elle milite également pour les droits environnementaux et autochtones. Son travail et sa posture artistique lui ont valu le titre de l’artiste de l’année au Saguenay Lac-St-Jean en 2020.
Elle a publié les recueils Béante, Frayer et Chauffer le dehors aux éditions La Peuplade
Joanne Arnott
is a Metis/mixed-blood poet, editor, essayist, and arts/community organizer originally from Manitoba. She has lived in the Lower Mainland for over three decades. She is a founding member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast, co-editing their anthology, Salish Seas: an anthology of text + image (2011) and other projects. She is mother to six children, all born at home. Her collections of poetry include Wiles of Girlhood (Gerald Lampert Award, 1991), My Grass Cradle (1992), Steepy Mountain Love Poetry (2004), Mother Time: New & Selected (2007), A Night for the Lady (2013) and Halfling Spring (2013). She published a children’s picture book with Mary Anne Barkhouse, Ma MacDonald (1991). Her non-fiction works include Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing (1995). In 2017 she received the Vancouver Mayor’s Art Award for the body of her work. Recent publications include a poetry chapbook, Pensive & beyond (2019), and the co-edited volume, Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry by Vera Manuel (2019). Joanne is Poetry Editor for EVENT Magazine, and Poetry Mentor at The Writers Studio, SFU.
Carleigh Baker
is a nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân /Icelandic writer and teacher who lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and have been anthologized in Canada and the United States. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. She was a 2019/20 Shadbolt fellow in the humanities at Simon Fraser University, where she now teaches creative writing. As a writer and researcher, Baker is particularly interested in how contemporary fiction can be used to address the climate crisis.
Billy-Ray Belcourt
is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He lives in Vancouver, where he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He has written three critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including This Wound is a World (Frontenac House 2017), which among many other awards won the 2018 Indigenous Voices Awards prize for Most Significant Book of Poetry in English; NDN Coping Mechanisms (Anansi 2019), and A History of my Brief Body (Hamish Hamilton 2020).
Michelle Coupal
is an Algonquin/French scholar of Indigenous literatures. She is a Canada Research Chair in Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Literatures, and an Associate Professor at the University of Regina. Michelle is a former President of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association. She specializes in and teaches courses on Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island, Indian Residential School literature, trauma and testimony, Indigenous media/film, and Canadian literature. She recently wrote the foreword to Bevann Fox’s novel, Genocidal Love, and co-edited a collection of the works by Vera Manuel, Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry. She has also recently written articles for The Conversation, Canadian Literature (online), and two edited book collections (L’enseignement des Traités à l’ère de la Réconciliation dans l’Ouest Canadien and Decolonizing and Indigenizing Education in Canada). She is currently co-editing special journal issues for Studies in American Indian Literature and Studies in Canadian Literature. She is also co-editing a book with Deanna Reder called How We Teach Indigenous Literatures. Her open-access website project, How to Teach Stories of Residential School, will be launched in 2021.
Margery Fee
PhD (Toronto), FRSC, Professor Emerita of English, UBC, specializes in Canadian, post-colonial and Indigenous literatures and Canadian English. She held the David and Brenda McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2015-2017) to work on early Indigenous oral and literary production. In 2008, as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, she worked on racialization and genetics at the UBC Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. She edited the UBC journal Canadian Literature from 2007 to 2015.
With Jan McAlpine, she co-authored The Guide to Canadian English Usage (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2011), and, with chief editor Stefan Dollinger, edited DCHP-2: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (2nd ed., online, 2017). Recent publications are Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015), Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Broadview, 2016) co-edited with Dory Nason; Polar Bear (Reaktion, 2019) and an edited collection of Jean Barman’s essays, On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space, and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia (Harbour, 2020). With Daniel Heath Justice, she is co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded project, The People and the Text, led by Deanna Reder (thepeopleandthetext.ca).
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek
A lively presence on Vancouver’s writing scene, Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi woman. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016), a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 B.C. Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards, and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the 2017 National Magazine Awards for Poetry in Canada. Her poem “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and is the title of her most recent work, a chapbook from Nomados Press (2019). She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia, in October 2019.
Francis Langevin
lives and works in Syilx territory at the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). He has been teaching French and literature in Francophone minority communities since 2010. A specialist in contemporary novels, he is interested in the relationship between style and values, as well as in representations of regionality in today's Quebec and French fiction. On these subjects, he has published articles and co-directed thematic issues in the magazines Voix et images, Tangence, Spirale, Contre-jour, @nalyses, temps zéro (2013 and 2014), and Arborescences.
Katherena Vermette
is a Métis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Métis nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses Company) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her novel, The Break (House of Anansi) was bestseller in Canada and won multiple awards, including the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
Her second book of poetry, river woman (House of Anansi) and eighth children’s picture book, The Girl and The Wolf (Theytus) were both released last year. She is also the author of the picture book series, The Seven Teachings Stories (Highwater Press) and the graphic novel series, A Girl Called Echo (Highwater Press). And, along with a whole team of talented filmmakers, she co-wrote and co-directed the short doc, this river (NFB) which won the 2017 Canadian Screen Award for Best Short.
Vermette lives with her family in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
is an award-winning visual contemporary artist, author and professional speaker. His work has been seen in public spaces, museums, galleries and private collections across the globe. Institutional collections include the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery. His large sculptural works are part of the public art collection of the Vancouver International Airport, City of Vancouver, City of Kamloops and University of British Columbia. Yahgulanaas's publications include national bestsellers Flight of the Hummingbird and RED, a Haida Manga. When not writing or producing art, Yahgulanaas pulls from his 20 years of political experience in the Council of the Haida Nation and travels the world speaking to businesses, institutions and communities about social justice, community building, communication and change management. His most recent talks include the American Museum of Natural History and TEDxVancouver.