Jas M. Morgan’s nîtisânak honours blood and chosen kin with equal care. A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, it is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn apart by the same. Using cyclical narrative techniques and drawing on their Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis ancestral teachings, this work offers a compelling perspective on the connections that must be broken and the ones that heal.
Winner of the 2019 Quebec Writers' Federation Concordia University First Book Prize
"[The author's] incredible insight, unblinking frankness, and surprising tenderness combine to create an unforgettable voice." -Alicia Elliott, Montreal Review of Books
"nîtisânak is wildly interesting, thoughtful, and tender, but also utterly uncompromising." -Jessie Loyer, The Capilano Review
"A triumph of decolonial and non-normative storytelling." -Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers jury citation
"A tremendous gift ... unlike any other reading experience I've had." -Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies
"nîtisânak is a tour-de-force of vulnerability, testimony, wit, camp, and critique!"-Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World, winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
Jas M. Morgan is a Toronto-based Cree-Métis-Saulteaux SSHRC doctoral scholarship recipient, a McGill University Art History Ph.D. candidate, and an assistant professor in X University’s Department of English. They previously held the position of Editor-at-Large for Canadian Art, served as the Arts and Literary Summit programmer for MagNet 2019, and edited mâmawi-âcimowak, an independent art, art criticism, and literature journal. Their writing has appeared in The Walrus, Malahat Review, Room, GUTS, esse, Teen Vogue, CV2/Prairie Fire, The New Inquiry and other publications.
