Jordan Abel Online Event

Join Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel as he discusses his powerful new memoir NISHGA with host Warren Cariou. This event presented by McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, and McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Registration is required to directly participate in the Zoom webinar. It will be simultaneously streamed on YouTube and available for viewing thereafter.

NISHGA is a groundbreaking, deeply personal, and devastating autobiographical meditation that attempts to address the complicated legacies of Canada’s residential school system and contemporary Indigenous existence.

Drawing on autobiography and a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible.

Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s work, including his visual poetry, has recently been widely anthologized, published in numerous journals and, exhibited broadly. Abel recently completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing.

Host Warren Cariou was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, into a family of mixed Métis and European heritage. He teaches in the Department of English, Film and Theatre and directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba.