Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His debut poetry collection, This Wound is a World (Frontenac House), was awarded the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, was named the Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer at the inaugural Indigenous Voices Awards, and won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. A 2016 Rhodes Scholar with a Master’s in Women’s Studies from Oxford, Belcourt is now a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the University of Alberta’s English & Film Studies department where he is working on a creative-theoretical project called “The Conspiracy of NDN Joy.” He lives in Edmonton.