33. Poets on the Body

Bardia Sinaee was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, where he was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. His first book is Intruder (Anansi, 2021).

Bunmi Laditan is an author, poet and tea drinker living in snowy Quebec, Canada by way of sunny California. Her latest book is Dear God: Honest Prayers to a God Who Listens (2021).

Cicely Belle Blain is a Black/mixed, queer femme from London, UK now living on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people. Their ancestry is a mix of Gambian (Wolof), Jamaican and English. At the heart of all their work, Cicely Belle harnesses their passion for justice, liberation and meaningful change via transformative education, always with laughter, and fearlessly in the face of systemic oppression.They are noted for founding Black Lives Matter Vancouver and subsequently being listed as one Vancouver’s 50 most powerful people by Vancouver Magazine in 2018 and again in 2020, BC Business’s 30 under 30 and one of Refinery29’s Powerhouses. Cicely Belle is the author of Burning Sugar, out now with Arsenal Pulp Press.

Dominik Parisien is a writer, editor, and poet. He is the author of the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) and his recent work has appeared in Maisonneuve, This Magazine, PRISM International, The Literary Review of Canada, and others. As an editor, his anthologies have won the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, British Fantasy, and Aurora Awards. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

Brandon Wint is an Ontario born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy and devastation and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. Increasingly, his work on the page and in performance casts a tender but robust attention toward the movements and impacts of colonial, capitalist logic, and how they might be undone. In this way, Brandon Wint is devoted to a poetics of world making, world altering and world breaking. For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violence futures for himself and the world he has inherited. His first book of poetry, Divine Animal, is out now with Write Bloody North.

Tenille K Campbell is a Dene/Métis author from English River First Nation in Northern Saskatchewan. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is enrolled in her PhD program at University of Saskatchewan. Her inaugural poetry book, #IndianLovePoems (Signature Editions, 2017) is an award-winning collection of poetry that focuses on Indigenous Erotica – using humour and storytelling to reclaim and explore ideas of Indigenous sexuality. Her newest collection, Nedi Nezu, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in spring 2021. She is also the artist behind sweetmoon photography and the co-creator of the women’s blog, tea&bannock.

Natasha Ramoutar is an Indo-Guyanese writer by way of Scarborough (Ganatsekwyagon) at the east side of Toronto. She is the Social Media Assistant at the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) and the Fiction Editor of Feel Ways, an anthology of Scarborough writing. Her first poetry collection Bittersweet was published by Mawenzi House in 2020.