Kai Cheng
Thom
Kai Cheng Thom is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and mental health community worker. She has written three books: Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, which was selected as the March/April 2019 read for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club, a place called No Homeland, and From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea. As a spoken word artist, she has appeared and featured at venues including Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Kai Cheng Thom has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She lives in Toronto.
Award History
Jury Citation
“Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a delicious and fabulist refashioning of a trans memoir as fiction. It is a cacophonous coming-of-age story and a genre-breaking refusal of the idea that the only stories trans people have to tell are their autobiographies. Her poems in A Place Called No Homeland are jelly-tender, tough as knives. They ride the borderland into and through trauma, relationships, love, and power, and carry us out deepened and changed over to the other side. Thom’s work is sheer joyful exuberance, creativity, and talent.” — 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers Jury (Eaton Hamilton, Elio Iannacci, and Trish Salah)
