Writers' Trust of Canada - 50 Years
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Joshua Whitehead

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer, Jonny Appleseed, and Making Love with the Land, and the editor of Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. He has been a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers, the Giller Prize, a Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Whitehead currently serves as an assistant professor at the University of Calgary (Treaty 7), where he holds a Research Excellence Chair in the departments of English and International Indigenous Studies. 

Writers & Books

Award History

2022 - Finalist

Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

for

Making Love with the Land

Jury Citation

“A collection that summons the reader into moving explorations of care and kinship with the land and with one another, Making Love with the Land is a lyrical, personal journey to be savoured. Refusing the demands of categorization, Whitehead’s beautiful book is equal parts arresting, inviting, and challenging. He writes with fluid dexterity in the English language, while acknowledging the complexity of creating and living in a language that is not always enough.”

Jury Citation

“Joshua Whitehead harnesses queerness, Indigeneity, and reclamation to articulate storytelling’s invaluable role in challenging the intelligentsia. In his collection, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, Whitehead plays particular attention to acknowledging ancestral connection and the body; he fuses Indigiqueer wisdom through the infinite potential of poetics and personhood. His debut novel, Jonny Appleseed, is provocative, compelling, and fiercely intersectional. Whitehead is a radical hybrid thinker, and a bold new voice who brings the deep past into the boundless present, which extends into a not so faraway future. Whitehead builds worlds within words.” -- 2018 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers Jury (Ali Blythe, Greg Kearney, and Shannon Webb-Campbell)

Program History

Works Recognized by WT