Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s work has been published in numerous journals and magazines—including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, and The Fiddlehead—and his work has been anthologized widely, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature. Abel completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation and Creative Writing.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954) is an internationally known artist and scholar of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent.  Since earning his MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia (1979), he has exhibited work in the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and Europe.  His work engages with issues around colonial history and contemporary experience.  In addition to his practice, Heap of Birds is a curator and lecturer, and is Professor Emeritus in the Native American Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. He was named USA Ford Fellow in 2012, Distinguished Alumni, University of Kansas, in 2014 and received honorary doctorates from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2008), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2017) and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (2018). In 2020, Heap of Birds was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a member of the Humanities and Arts class, with a specialty in Visual Arts.