Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She is the author of three previous poetry collections—Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild, winner of the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, and the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, and longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

She is also the editor of an anthology of fantasy short stories titled Maiden Mother and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes. She has been a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and her personal essay, “A Body Like A Home,” was the Gold Prize Winner for the National Magazine Awards in Personal Journalism. day/break, her fourth book of poetry, is forthcoming from Book*hug in Spring 2020. She is also currently editing a book of creative non-fiction called trans girl in love. She lives in Toronto and is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

DAY/BREAK

day/break, is Gwen Benaway’s fourth collection of work, and explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world.

Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.

DIVE DEEPER

• “Gwen Benaway isn’t letting critics slow her down” — The Queen’s Journal
• “Trans poet Gwen Benaway says Governor General’s Literary Award a ‘double-edged sword’” — Global News
• “A Body Like A Home” — Hazlitt
• “Trans people cannot be erased. We have always existed, and will continue to live.” — Maclean’s