Michelle Good in Conversation with Shelagh Rogers and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm

Join Zoom Meeting
https://ubc.zoom.us/j/61343160899?pwd=T09OeVNjeWcwZC96VlpjYTdYRG54UT09
Meeting ID: 613 4316 0899
Passcode: 877911

Featuring Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and her dynamic new collection of poetry (Re)Generation.

Shelagh Rogers is a veteran broadcast-journalist, currently the host and a producer of The Next Chapter, a CBC radio program devoted to writing in Canada. In 2011, she was inducted as an Honorary Witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Also that year, she was named to the Order of Canada as an Officer, for promoting Canadian culture, adult literacy, mental health and truth and reconciliation. In 2016, she received the first-ever Margaret Trudeau Award for Mental Health Advocacy. She holds eight honorary doctorates. Currently, Shelagh is Chancellor of the University of Victoria. 100 years ago this year, her great-grandmother Edith Rogers was the first woman, and the first Métis woman, elected to the Manitoba Legislature. Shelagh is a member of the Métis Nation of Greater Victoria.

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is Anishinaabe from the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, Chippewas of Nawash First Nation at Neyaashiinigmiing on the Saugeen Peninsula in southwestern Ontario. She is an Assistant Professor, Creative Writing, Indigenous Literatures and Oral traditions in the English Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. She is the founder, Publisher, and Managing Editor of Kegedonce Press, an Indigenous publishing company that has been producing literary books by Indigenous writers from across Canada and internationally since 1993. Kateri is a well known writer, a spoken word artist, a librettist, and a mentor to writers through her work as an publisher, professor, and editor. She has done readings, performances, and speaking engagements around the world. Her 2015 book of short fiction, The Stone Collection, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for a Sarton Literary Award. She wrote the Globe and Mail opinion piece, “The cultural appropriation debate is over. It’s time for action,” the graphic novel, Nimkii, about children caught in the CAS Scoops, for the anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold, and is working on a second collection of short fiction. (Re)Generation: The Poetry of Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, collected and with an introduction by Dallas Hunt, was released this year by Wilfrid University Press. Kateri was one of the jurors for the inaugural Indigenous Voices Awards as well as for the 2018 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Awards. Kateri is the proud mother of two loving and creative boys.

Michelle Good is of Cree ancestry, a descendent of the Battle River Cree and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation. She has worked with indigenous organizations since she was a teenager and at forty decided to approach that work in a different way obtaining her law degree from UBC at 43. She has practiced law in the public and private sector since then, primarily advocating for Residential School Survivors.

She graduated from UBC with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing MFA in 2014 where her novel Five Little Indians first started taking shape. Her poetry, and short stories have appeared in a number of publications. Her first novel, Five Little Indians was the winner of the 2021 Amazon First Novel Award, the 2021 Kobo Emerging Author Prize, and the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It has also won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize and her poetry has been included in Best Canadian Poetry in Canada 2016 and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in Canada 2017. She was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Finalist for the Writer's Trust Prize and Finalist for the Evergreen Award.