Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He read for an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford, where was the first-ever First Nations person from Canada to hold a Rhodes scholarship. His debut book of poems, This Wound is a World, was published by Frontenac House in the fall of 2017. It was named by CBC Books as the best "Canadian poetry" collection of 2017 and won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, making him the youngest person to win the award. His sophomore book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, is due out in the fall of 2019 with House of Anansi Press. A public intellectual, his work has been featured in Canadian Art, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, and ArtsEverywhere.ca. He has taught creative writing at the Edmonton Remand Centre and the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity; he was Mount Royal University's 2018 Emerging Scholar-in-Residence in the Office of Academic Indigenization. His research interests stretch from queer and trans Indigenous studies to visual culture to ethics.