by Alicia Elliott

In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing, and representation. In the process she makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political, from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Indigenous writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy; to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner; to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Indigenous communities.

With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott provides a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present, and a powerful tool for a better future.

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About the Author

Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, The Butter, Room, Grain, The New Quarterly, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Vice, Maclean’s, Today’s Parent and Reader’s Digest, among others. 

She’s currently Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead, Associate Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly. Her essay, “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017, and another of her essays, “On Seeing and Being Seen: Writing With Empathy” was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2018. 

She was the 2017-2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at the University of British Columbia and was chosen by Tanya Talaga to receive the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize in 2018. Her short story “Unearth” was selected by Roxane Gay to appear in Best American Short Stories 2018. Alicia is also presently working on a manuscript of short fiction.