(actor: Land)
Louise Bernice Halfe is a poet and social worker whose Cree name is Sky Dancer. She is Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Halfe weaves Cree language and teachings into her work, a political act against silence and erasure. Born in Two Hills, Alberta, and raised on Saddle Lake Reserve, she has written five poetry collections. Blue Marrow, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the acclaimed Burning in this Midnight Dream, are her responses to the painful legacy of the residential school system—of which she is a survivor. Halfe’s newest collection honours her culture and invites laughter: in awâsis – kinky and disheveled, a gender-fluid trickster figure leaps from Cree stories into her lively, lyrical poems. Halfe, who began writing poetry when she was 16, received the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize in 2017 for her remarkable body of work, served as Saskatchewan’s poet laureate, and lives in Saskatoon.