Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. His debut book of poems, This Wound is a World (Frontenac House, 2017), was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. In 2019, Belcourt released his second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (House of Anansi), that won the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. His most recent book, A History of My Brief Body (Hamish Hamilton, 2020), is a collection of essays on grief, colonial violence, joy, love and queerness.