In Conversation with Billy-Ray Belcourt

"Sometimes she touches the walls as though to do so is to touch him. It's an act of mourning. More than that, it's how she collapses the past into the present. It's a way of staying alive."

In Coexistence, his fifth book and first collection of short stories, Billy-Ray Belcourt explores love, loss and longing in sublime and luminous prose. Join us for a reading from Coexistence by Belcourt, followed by a discussion about this recent addition to his stunning and accomplished body of work, which tenderly illuminates the complexity and beauty of Indigenous lives, histories, and possibilities.

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. His bestselling memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General's Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.

Michelle Cyca (she/her) is a journalist and essayist living on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in what is recently called Vancouver. She is an editor with The Narwhal and a contributing writer to The Walrus. Her writing can often be found in Maclean's, Chatelaine, The Tyee and The Globe & Mail. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief and co-publisher of SAD Mag. Her feature story, The Curious Case of Gina Adams, received a National Magazine Award in 2023 for investigative journalism, and was published in April 2024 as a limited-edition hardcover. She's a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6, Saskatchewan.

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