Artist-In-Residence

Jody Chan is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and care worker. They are the author of Haunt (Damaged Goods Press), All Our Futures (PANK), and Sick (Black Lawrence Press). They are the winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. They are also a performing member with RAW Taiko Drummers. During their residency, Chan will work on a hybrid manuscript of poetry and essays exploring crip queer narratives and rituals around birth, death, and suicidality in relation to climate crisis, the ongoing pandemic, and the many past and future apocalypses in our and our ancestors’ lifetimes. In collaboration with other artists and movement workers, and via the multi-sensory, multi-access practice and ethics of disability poetics, they will also work towards creating audio and video pieces to accompany this manuscript, as well as their second book impact statement, which will be published in Spring 2024 with Brick Books. Chan’s first two books contend with how the idea of home is often weaponized by the state and intimately tied to the violence, trauma, and loss experienced by queer and trans disabled people. This project thinks through how home can be different, a site of safety and justice, building on a body of work by folks like Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Stacey Park Milbern, Mia Mingus, and many more, in talking about crip lives, crip grief, and the worlds we build for each other.

Brian Rigg is a Jamaican/Canadian writer and poet based in Toronto. His poems have been published in magazines from the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. They have also been anthologized in Ma’ka, Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writing by Queers of African Descent (Sister Vision Press) and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets (Arsenal Pulp Press). A False Paradise, his first collection of poetry, was published by ECW Press in 2001. A small group of his poems titled Soft Animals won the 2021 Steel Toe Books chapbook competition. He is a proud LAMBDA Fellow from the 2016 cohort. During his residency, Rigg will work on a collection of poems currently titled Warrior in the Garden. Drawing inspiration from Afro-Surrealism and the Black Fantastic, the new poems will explore how absurdism and speculative fictions inform Black queer life and create spaces for disruption, resistance, and transgressive play. He will also organize a weeklong workshop crafted for BIPOC, Queer and Trans poets, culminating in a reading event.

Previous Artists-in-Residence

2022-23: Rhoma Spencer

2021-22: Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野

2020-21: Michèle Pearson Clarke