Jurors 2022 — Indigenous Voices Awards

2022 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 is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing.

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.

Warren Cariou

Warren Cariou has devoted much of his career to studying the literature, storytelling traditions and environmental politics of Indigenous communities in Canada, especially in Métis, Cree, and Anishinaabe territories. He was inspired to study Indigenous stories by the example of his late father Ray Cariou, a gifted Métis raconteur. He has published works of fiction and memoir as well as critical writing, and he has also created photography and video projects about Indigenous communities in western Canada’s tar sands region. He is a Professor in the department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba.

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet who completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia in October 2019 and is now an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University. 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).

JD Kurtness

Julie Kurtness left her native North to study microbes in Montreal, but eventually branched out into writing and, more recently, computer science. Under her pen name J. D. Kurtness, she published her first novel, *De vengeance*, with L’instant même in 2017. Critically acclaimed, the book, with its acid humour, tells the story of a sympathetic serial killer. Her second novel, *Aquariums* (L’instant même, 2019) is a tale of anticipation where humanity is the victim of an unprecedented epidemic. Recent events make her consider writing next about World Peace.

Photo by: Seb Lozé

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*.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

is a Cree and Métis artist and writer. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Often, her works emerge from a curiosity about how land becomes legal property, and what the vulnerabilities of this relationship are.

Hill's work her has been exhibited at various places including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2021), the Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto (2019), and the SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montreal with the Woodland School (2017). She is also the co-editor of The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (ARP 2009) and Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (Wilfrid Laurier 2017). Hill lives and works on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.