In an event hosted by the King’s Co-op Bookstore, Joshua Whitehead makes his first Maritime stop in Halifax before heading to Moncton as a headliner for this year’s FRYE Festival! Registration is required with a $5 ticket charge but if the cost is a barrier to attend please reach out to the King’s Co-op Bookstore at manager@kingsbookstore.ca. Joshua’s and Arielle’s books will be on-site for sale including Joshua’s brand new title Ingiqueerness that releases April 25th.

Joshua Whitehead (he/him) is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, and Killam scholar at the University of Calgary where he studies Indigenous literatures and cultures with a focus on gender and sexuality. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Feral Fatalisms,” is a hybrid narrative of theory, essay, and nonfiction that interrogates the role of “ferality” inherent within Indigenous ways of being (with a strong focus on nêhiyawewin). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017) which was shortlisted for the inaugural Indigenous Voices Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry.

He is also the author of Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018) which was long listed for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Whitehead’s most recent books are Making Love with the Land which explores the intersections of Indigeneity, queerness, and, most prominently, mental health through a nêhiyaw lens, and Indigiqueerness: A Conversation About Storytelling, releasing April 25th. You can also find his work published widely in such venues as Prairie Fire, CV2, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Grain, CNQ, Write, and Red Rising Magazine.

Arielle Twist is a Nehiyaw (Cree) multidisciplinary artist and sex educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia located in Canada. She is originally from George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan and identifies as a Two-Spirit, transgender woman. She was mentored in her early career by writer Kai Cheng Thom and has since published a collection of poems in 2019 in her book Disintegrate / Dissociate, began working as a sex educator at Venus Envy, and become an MFA candidate at OCAD University Graduate Studies in the Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design (IAMD) program.

Twist has also expanded her artistry past poetry into visual and performance art. Over her time as an artist, Arielle Twist has had her work featured in Khyber Centre for the Arts, Toronto Media Arts Centre, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Centre for Art Tapes, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Twist has also won the Indigenous Voices Award for English poetry and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for emerging LGBTQ writers in 2020.

 

Tickets