Jen Currin, Conor Kerr and Cecily Nicholson are award-winning writers and truthtellers who use imagery, landscape and a sense of place to form unexpected poems that call for change and help forge connection and compassion.
Jen Currin lives on unceded Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, and Musqueam territories (New Westminster, BC) and teaches writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Jen’s first collection of stories, Hider/Seeker (Anvil Press) was awarded a Canadian Independent Book Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. They have published five collections of poetry, most recently Trinity Street (House of Anansi), as well as The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil Press), Hagiography (Coach House), The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, winner of the 2011 Audre Lorde Award), and School (Coach House).
Conor Kerr is a Métis Ukrainian writer. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is a descendant of the Lac Ste. Anne Métis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family are settlers in Treaty Four and Six territories in Saskatchewan. He likes to wrestle Labradors and wander around looking for birds. He was named a CBC writer to watch in 2022. He is the author of the poetry collections Old Gods (Nightwood Editions) and An Explosion of Feathers (Bookland Press) as well as the novel Avenue of Champions (Nightwood Editions), which won a 2022 ReLit Award, was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Cecily Nicholson is the author of four books and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor in Poetry at the School of Creative Writing, UBC. Nicholson is the first honouree of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society and will be the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley. Her poetry collections are Harrowings, Wayside Sang, From the Poplars and Triage (all published by TalonBooks).
