Summer Writers 2026

Dr. Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s latest work–a novel titled Empty Spaces–  was published by McClelland & Stewart and Yale University Press, and was the winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction as well as the winner of a Banff Mountain Book Award. Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

Dr. Adam Dickinson iis a writer and professor of literature and creative writing at Brock University. His research-creation practice integrates expanded modes of writing with laboratory-based scientific experiments to investigate the complicated interplay between bodies and environments. He is the author of four books of poetry, a co-written book of architectural and poetic theory, an edited anthology, and a co-edited anthology. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has been featured at international literary festivals such as Poetry International in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the Oslo International Poetry Festival in Norway. He was also part of the VERSschmuggel poetry translation project hosted in conjunction with Poesiefestival Berlin, Germany. Along with Claudia Rankine and Valzhyna Mort, he was a member of the jury for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2023 he was an affiliated artist with the University of Copenhagen working at the intersection of metabolism and art. His most recent book is a lyrical, multifaceted dialogue co-written with the Danish architect Søren Pihlmann, and featured as part of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Dodie Bellamy is a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, personal essayist, and art journalist. She has published a dozen books, including (with Semiotexte) Bee Reaved, When the Sick Rule the World, and The Letters of Mina Harker. She’s written for numerous art catalogues and journals, including Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Apartamento, Gagosian Quarterly, diaphenes, The Village Voice, and Los Angeles Review of Books. With Kevin Killian, she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (2017). Bellamy was the 2018-19 subject of California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute’s “On Our Mind” program—a series of public events, commissioned essays, workshops, and reading group exploring her writing—culminating with the 2020 monograph Dodie Bellamy is on Our Mind. In 2023 she received a Guggenheim fellowship in Nonfiction.

Lisa Pearson is a publisher, editor, designer as well as the founder of Siglio Press, an independent publishing house driven by its feminist ethos and committed to publishing uncommon books that live in the rich and varied space between of art and literature. In the seventeen years since Pearson started Siglio in a garage in Los Angeles, Siglio titles have won two AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers awards and garnered high praise from the New York Times, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, among dozens of other media. Siglio is now located in the Southern Berkshires in Massachusetts.