For more details or to schedule an interview, email Ashley Fortier or call 438-338-4591
About the Author
Jas M. Morgan is a Toronto-based Cree-Métis-Saulteaux SSHRC doctoral scholarship recipient, a McGill University Art History Ph.D. candidate, and an assistant professor in Ryerson University’s Department of English. They previously held the position of Editor-at-Large for Canadian Art and served as the Arts and Literary Summit programmer for MagNet 2019. Morgan’s first book nîtisânak (Metonymy Press, 2018) won the prestigious 2019 Dayne Ogilive Prize and a 2019 Quebec Writer’s Federation first book prize, and has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and an Indigenous Voices Literary Award. Morgan is the co-founder of gijiit: a curatorial collective that focuses on community-engaged Indigenous art curations, gatherings, and research dealing with themes of gender, sex, and sexuality. They are a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award recipient, and have been awarded national Magazine Awards in the Essay category for “Stories Not Told” and in the Best-Editorial Package category for “#MeToo and the Secrets Indigenous Women Keep.” For their work as lead editor for the summer 2017 issue of Canadian Art, an issue on the theme of “Kinship,” they were also nominated for a National Magazine Award in the “Best Editorial Package” category. Morgan’s writing has appeared in The Walrus, Malahat Review, Room, GUTS, esse, Teen Vogue, CV2/Prairie Fire, The New Inquiry and other publications.
About the Book
Winner of the 2019 Quebec Writers Federation Concordia First Book Award and the 2019 Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers; Short-listed for the 31st Annual Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award.
Jas M. Morgan’s nîtisânak honours blood and chosen kin with equal care. A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, it is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn apart by the same. Using cyclical narrative techniques and drawing on their Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis ancestral teachings, this work offers a compelling perspective on the connections that must be broken and the ones that heal.
Selected for publication by Metonymy Press by the Gay Book Lovers Unite jury: Gwen Benaway, Helen Chau Bradley, Kama La Mackerel, jiaqing wilson-yang
nîtisânak in the media:
Specs
Title: nîtisânak
Author: Jas M. Morgan
Trim size: 5.25′ x 8′
Format: Paperback
Season: Fall 2018
Pub date: September 15, 2018
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-9940471-7-5 (paperback)
Category: Creative nonfiction, memoir
Target Audience: Indigenous people, Two-Spirit people, QTBIPOC, queers
Market
Listen to a Spotify playlist inspired by the book
keywords: nonlinear, kinship teachings, Indigenous and queer kinship, chosen family, relatedness
Quotable quote: “That love I’ve searched for in my chosen kin, for as long as I’ve been searching for chosen kin. I mean, just because they couldn’t love me right doesn’t mean they didn’t teach me a little something about it.”
One-liner: nîtisânak is for the queer prairie kids, the Cree adoptees, the brown two-spirit femmes looking for family and decolonization.
See for comparison:
Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Simpson
Jonny Appleseed, by Joshua Whitehead
Dirty River, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Advance Praise
“A tremendous gift … unlike any other reading experience I’ve had.”
—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance
“[Jas M. Morgan’s] nîtisânak is a tour-de-force of vulnerability, testimony, wit, camp, and critique!”
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World, winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
“nîtisânak is startling, original, dark, and honest: a compelling feminist text on the complexities of kinship.”
—Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
Press Images
