A collection of words and imagery from diverse voices grounded in the land that explore community in relation to time. Filmmaker/writer, Darlene Naponse, curates a gathering of expression about time that has passed, time that is now and time that comes.

Darlene Naponse is an Anishinaabe from Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, Northern Ontario, where she was born and raised. She is a writer, independent film director, video artist, and community activist. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. Several of her short stories have been published in the Yellow Medicine Review, Along the 46th Anthology, and The Malahat Review. She is currently working on a book of short stories. She works from her studio on the Rez (Atikameksheng Anishnawbek).

"In Humane, Anna Marie Sewell's brings an Indigenous and poetic sensibility to the crime novel, infusing it with imagery and dance as a Métis mother of two works as an unlicensed Private Investigator. Like its Métis characters, Humane straddles two worlds, following the contours of Western-based novel but infusing it with Indigenous storytelling and allegory. It's a wonderful read, a significant addition to the canon of authentic Indigenous crime novel." --Wayne Arthurson, award-winning writer of the Leo Desroches novels.

Who steals a dog from a shelter after receiving a dream message from their grandmother?
Hazel Lesage never expected it to be her. Then again, she didn't plan on becoming an unlicensed PI, helping the 'throwaway people.' However much has changed in Amiskwaciy, the problem of poor Indigenous women and girls being expendable hasn't. Nobody else is going to help the Augusts find out who killed their daughter Nell; so Hazel takes the case. And then she takes the dog.
What follows will force Hazel and her family to confront the question of what it means to be Human, and what it matters to be Humane.

Anna Marie Sewell is an award-winning multi-genre writer/performer, whose career has centred around collaborative multidisciplinary work, including Ancestors & Elders, Reconciling Edmonton (which featured the first ever Round Dance at Edmonton's City Hall), Braidings, Honour Songs and Heart of the Flower. As Edmonton's 4th Poet Laureate, Anna Marie created and curated The PoemCatcher public art installation. She founded and ran Big Sky Theatre, a three year training and performance project producing original Aboriginal (it was the 90s) theatre with urban youth. She is also a founding member of the Stroll of Poets, which has provided an entrée into Edmonton's public poetry community since 1991.

Anna Marie authored two critically-acclaimed (and much-shortlisted) poetry collections, Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House, 2009), and 2018's For the Changing Moon: Poems & Songs (Thistledown Press). Her essays and articles appear in Eighteen Bridges, Alberta Views, New Trail, Write Magazine, Legacy and various scholarly publications. She's even had a recipe published in a cookbook.

Humane is Anna Marie's first novel. She drafted it with support from an Edmonton Artist Trust Fund award, and finished it as part of her tenure as MacEwan University's 2019/20 Writer in Residence, a gig which has also entailed performing with a 24 piece orchestra, co-producing 2 multilingual poetry & song showcases, and collaborating with an array of artists and educators. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

Mnidoo Bemaasing Bemaadiziwin is a twenty-five year research and community based book. It brings forward Indigenous thought, history, and acts of resistance as viewed through the survivors of residential school who through certain aspects of their young lives were able to persevere with resiliency, and share their life experiences, teaching us about them, and their understanding of their own resiliency. Through their voices, we hear how they found strength within?their own life force energy, or mnidoo bemaasing bemaadiziwin?and survived and thrived in spite of aggressive assimilation.

It became clear to Dr. Turmell that in their descriptions of resiliency, readers were describing mnidoo bemaasing bemaadiziwin?an innate and holistic energy that can be found within everyone. Mnidoo bemaasing bemaadiziwin manifests within all of our relations: land, animals, plants, ancestors, and other people, and cannot be extinguished but can be severely dampened as was evident in the attempt to assimilate residential school students. From their accounts, we learn that students found ways to nurture their life force energy through relationships and acts of resistance. As they?ve continued on their life path, they have reclaimed their spirit and today, they are telling their stories and keeping this history alive for the benefit of future generations.

Dr. Theresa Turmel (Biidaaban Ntam bi yaad) is an Anishinaabe-kwe from Michipicoten First Nation. She completed her Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies from Trent University in 2013. Her doctoral dissertation, Forever We Will Remain: Reflections and Memories: ?Resiliency? Concerning the Walpole Island Residential School Survivors Group, was the product of twenty plus years of a participatory, community-based partnership with the residential school survivors from Walpole Island. Her most significant research work has been working with Indian residential school survivors in a special project capacity with a critical analysis of resiliency theory. In her personal life, Theresa is the proud mother of three adult children, John, Danielle and Chantal and extremely proud grandmother of Ariel, Alexandra, Dylahn, Emma-Leigh and Ben and has been married to husband Mike for the past thirty-six years.

day/break, Governor General's Literary Award winner Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.

Praise for Holy Wild:

"This book is many things, and we are grateful." —Katherena Vermette, author of the award-winning novel The Break

"In Holy Wild, Benaway sounds forth a chorus of pronouncements that look something like I am "x," where "x" is at once unavailable to some and ever-proliferating: "this is what makes us holy / even if we are the only ones / who know it." It is in this refusal of singularity that Benaway conjures trans life in a place that is both prior to and in excess of the violence that mires it." —Billy-Ray Belcourt, Griffin Prize winning author of This Wound is a World

"Unapologetically, Benaway dares to imagine and celebrate Indigenous transness as radical softness, as sexually active resistance that doesn't entail oppression, but an urgent desire to be here, right now, despite a reality that refuses to acknowledge or even allow its existence in the first place." —Anomaly

Gwen Benaway is the author of three collections of poetry—Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. It was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, and the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, and was longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She is the editor of an anthology of fantasy short stories titled Maiden Mother and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes. She has been a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada, and her personal essay, "A Body Like A Home," was the Gold Prize Winner for the National Magazine Awards in Personal Journalism. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Print and digital ARCs available.
Tour: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Kingston, Halifax, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon.