|

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. Belcourt’s debut book of poems, This Wound is a World, won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award, and was named by CBC Books as one of the best Canadian poetry collections of 2018. Belcourt is a PhD student and a 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He was also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies from Wadham College at the University of Oxford. In January 2020, he will be an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Website: billy-raybelcourt.com
Instagram: @nakinisowin
Twitter: @BillyRayB

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World is a beautiful elegy on how to live and love as a queer NDN in a world wrought by a tear. His book marks a new wave of Indigenous literature that is brimming with queerness, gender re-membrance, trans creators and a singing home of Two-Spirit livelihoods.” — Joshua Whitehead

FESTIVAL BOOK

NDN Coping Mechanisms

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field emerges out of a form of auto/ethnographic sensibility that is at turns campy and playful, jarring and candid, displaying, once again, the writer’s extraordinary craft, guile, audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination.

Part One examines the rhythms of everyday life, which include the terrible beauty of the reserve, the afterlives of history, and the grammar of anal sex. Part Two experiments with form and practice, putting to use, for example, a mode of documentary poetics that unearths the logics that make and unmake texts like Treaty 8.

DIVE DEEPER

Interviews

  • “An interview with Billy-Ray Belcourt” — Room Magazine
  • “Reconciling Academia and Creative Writing: An Interview with Billy-Ray Belcourt” — invisiblepublishing.com
  • “Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt on feeling more ’empowered’ to write a year after his Griffin Poetry Prize win” — CBC
  • “Hailed by CanLit, poet Billy-Ray Belcourt allies with Indigenous ‘resistance’” — CTV

Profiles

ALL EVENTS WITH Billy-Ray Belcourt

3 PM
Speak Up: Billy-Ray Belcourt & Ivan Coyote
Oct 20 @ 3 PM MT - 4:30 PM MT

Patricia A. Whelan Performance Hall, Central Library

800 3 Street SE
5 PM
A Conversation with Billy-Ray Belcourt
Oct 21 @ 5 PM MT - 6:15 PM MT

Memorial Park Library, 2nd Floor

1221 2 St SW