Taslim Jaffer (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from University of King’s College where she is now a Publishing instructor. She also teaches creative writing at University of the Fraser Valley. For over a decade, she has taught in community and rehabilitative settings including psychiatric units, addiction treatment facilities, libraries and literary arts festivals. Taslim is co-editor of the anthology, Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity and Home (Bookhug*Press, 2024), 26 literary travel essays exploring the hyphenated identity. Back Where I Came From is a 2024 Foreword INDIES Gold Winner for Anthologies and hailed as “worth reading slowly, thinking about, and reading again” by The British Columbia Review. Her bylines appear in Macleans, CBC, WestCoast Families, Peace Arch News and other online/print media and her essays are published in anthologies. She is the winner of the 2022 Creative Nonfiction Collective/Humber Literary Review contest and recipient of a 2021 Silver Canadian Online Publishing Award. She serves on the Board for Word Vancouver. Taslim’s work-in-progress is an essay collection exploring cultural inheritance, identity and liminal spaces. Her work is supported by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, City of Richmond, B.C. Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.