Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD candidate in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and soon-to-be assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. His books are This Wound is a World (Frontenac House, 2017), winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; NDN Coping Mechanisms (House of Anansi, 2019), and A History of My Brief Body (Hamish Hamilton, 2020).
Billy-Ray Belcourt would've been faculty at Banff Centre's Poetry, Politics, and Embodiment Literary Arts Thematic Residency. That program had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, Billy-Ray Belcourt takes on the political demands of queerness, mainstream portrayals of Indigenous life, love and its discontents, and the limits and uses of poetry as a vehicle for Indigenous liberation.