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Joshua
Whitehead

Joshua Whitehead is the author of the poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, which was shortlisted for an Indigenous Voices Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He was a finalist for the 2018 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. His novel, Jonny Appleseed, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and won the 2021 edition of CBC Canada Reads. His work has been published in Prairie Fire, CV2, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, Grain, CNQ, and Red Rising Magazine. Whitehead is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation, Treaty 1/Manitoba. He is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Treaty 7/Alberta.

Award History

2022 Finalist

Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
for Making Love with the Land

Jury Citation

“A collection that summons the reader into moving explorations of care and kinship with the land and with one another, Making Love with the Land is a lyrical, personal journey to be savoured. Refusing the demands of categorization, Whitehead’s beautiful book is equal parts arresting, inviting, and challenging. He writes with fluid dexterity in the English language, while acknowledging the complexity of creating and living in a language that is not always enough.”

Jury Citation

“Joshua Whitehead harnesses queerness, Indigeneity, and reclamation to articulate storytelling’s invaluable role in challenging the intelligentsia. In his collection, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, Whitehead plays particular attention to acknowledging ancestral connection and the body; he fuses Indigiqueer wisdom through the infinite potential of poetics and personhood. His debut novel, Jonny Appleseed, is provocative, compelling, and fiercely intersectional. Whitehead is a radical hybrid thinker, and a bold new voice who brings the deep past into the boundless present, which extends into a not so faraway future. Whitehead builds worlds within words.” -- 2018 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers Jury (Ali Blythe, Greg Kearney, and Shannon Webb-Campbell)

Program History

Works recognized by WT

Full-Metal Indigiqueer

Jonny Appleseed