Description
Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection This Wound is a World. He has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award—once in poetry for the debut and in non-fiction for his memoir, A History of My Brief Body. Both his works of fiction, A Minor Chorus and Coexistence, were national bestsellers. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
Part of the groundbreaking Kanata Classics list, with a new introduction by Audra Simpson, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Griffin Prize winning poetry debut catapulted him into a beloved voice of his generation.
Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize • Winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize • Winner of the Indigenous Voices Award for Most Significant Work of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer.
Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.” Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.”