Kai Cheng Thom is a Canadian writer [1] and former social worker. [2] Thom, a non-binary trans woman, [3] has published four books, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (2016), [4] the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017), [5] a children's book, From the Stars in The Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017), [6] and I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World (2019), a book of essays centered on transformative justice. [2]
Thom's first book, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir , was published by Metonymy Press in 2016. [1] It was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction at the 29th Lambda Literary Awards, [7] and the year after it was published Thom won the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging writers. [8] The Dayne Ogilvie jury, consisting of writers Jane Eaton Hamilton, Elio Iannacci and Trish Salah, cited Thom's work as "sheer joyful exuberance, creativity, and talent", calling Fierce Femmes "a delicious and fabulist refashioning of a trans memoir as fiction" and "a genre-breaking refusal of the idea that the only stories trans people have to tell are their autobiographies." [8] In 2019, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars was chosen by Emma Watson for her online feminist book club Our Shared Shelf. [9]
Thom's debut children's picture book, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea was published in 2017 by Arsenal Pulp Press. [10]
In 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press published Thom's debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland. The book was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2018, [11] and was a shortlisted finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. [12] Room Magazine called the book a "vulnerable, shimmering debut." [13] Further in the Room Magazine review, the reviewer Adele Barclay writes "Many of Thom's poems deploy this bold, storytelling voice, foregrounding the wisdom of what is said, experienced, lived, rumoured, and gossiped in lieu of traditional history with its myopia of normativity. a place called No Homeland consistently examines the collisions that marginalized identities encounter. And through this, Thom finds, 'there is a poem waiting deep below.'" [13]
In 2019, Thom published her non-fiction debut, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World. [2] It was a 2020 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, and won the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. [14]
In 2020, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea was selected by Julie Andrews for inclusion in her Julie's Library podcast. [15]
Thom has written for Xtra Magazine , Everyday Feminism , BuzzFeed , Autostraddle , Asian American Literary Review and xoJane .
Thom has dual master's degrees in social work and couple and family therapy from McGill University. [16]
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Trish Salah is an Arab Canadian poet, activist, and academic. She is the author of the poetry collections, Wanting in Arabic, published in 2002 by TSAR Publications and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, published by Roof Books in 2014. An expanded Canadian edition of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1 was published by Metonymy Press in 2017.
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The Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers is a Canadian literary award, presented annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an emerging Canadian writer who is part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer community. Originally presented as a general career achievement award for emerging writers that considered their overall body of work, since 2022 it has been presented to honor debut books.
Amber Dawn is a Canadian writer, who won the 2012 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender writer.
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Ben Ladouceur is a Canadian writer, whose poetry collection Otter was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry at the 28th Lambda Literary Awards and won the Gerald Lampert Award in 2016.
The Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature is an annual literary award, presented by Publishing Triangle to honour works of literature on transgender themes. The award may be presented for work in any genre of literature; to be eligible, a work of poetry or fiction must be written by a transgender or gender variant author, while a work of non-fiction may be written or cowritten by a cisgender writer as long as it addresses transgender themes.
Eva Crocker is a Canadian writer based in St. John's, whose debut short story collection Barrelling Forward was published in 2017.
Catherine Hernandez is a Canadian writer, whose debut novel Scarborough was a shortlisted finalist for the 2017 Toronto Book Awards and the 2018 Edmund White Award.
Joshua Whitehead is a Canadian First Nations, two spirit poet and novelist.
Gwen Benaway is Canadian poet and activist. She is a PhD candidate in the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. Benaway has also written non-fiction for The Globe and Mail and Maclean's.
Jas M. Morgan is an Indigenous Canadian writer, who won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for emerging LGBTQ writers in 2019.
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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.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir is a 2016 Canadian book by Kai Cheng Thom. A surrealist novel, it follows an unnamed transgender woman protagonist who leaves home at a young age to live on the Street of Miracles—where various sex work takes place—with other "femmes". After one of them is killed, others form a gang and begin to attack men on the street.
Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, activist, translator, and community organizer who resides in Montreal, Quebec. Their artistic practice moves between theatre, dance, spoken word and written poetry, watercolours, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. Working across multiple disciplines, La Mackerel's work explores their identity as a trans femme of colour who reaches back beyond the immediate constraints of the colonial circumstances of their life to the spiritual ancestral lineages of queer femmes.
Scarborough is the debut novel by Canadian writer Catherine Hernandez, published in 2017. Set in the Toronto district of Scarborough, the novel centres on the coming-of-age of three young children living in the low-income Galloway Road neighbourhood — Bing, a boy struggling with his sexual identity; Laura, a girl who longs for stability as she is continually being shuffled back and forth between her mother's and her father's separate homes; and Sylvie, a girl whose family is living in a homeless shelter — as well as Hina, a community literacy worker who strives to be an oasis of support and guidance for underprivileged children in her community.