Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a Cree poet and writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada. His debut poetry collection This Wound is a World (2017) won the Griffin Poetry Prize for a Canadian poet in 2018, making him the youngest poet ever to win the prize. The collection is a raw and formally inventive exploration of queer Indigenous experience, grief, desire, and the body. Belcourt is also the author of NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019) and A History of My Brief Body (2020), his debut memoir. His work blends lyric poetry, theory, and memoir to develop a mode of writing that refuses the separation of the intellectual from the personal and the political. He earned his DPhil in English at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is now an assistant professor in the Department of English at UBC. Belcourt is a central figure in the emergence of a new generation of Indigenous writers in Canada who are reshaping how literature thinks about sovereignty, desire, and survivance.