Jónína Kirton

Jónína Kirton is a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet.   She graduated from the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio in 2007, where she is now an instructor.  Although she acknowledges and is thankful for the teachings offered through academic institutions, she leans heavily into what some term ‘other ways of knowing’.  Her writing is often a weaving of body and land as she firmly believes until we care for women’s bodies we will not care for the earth.

A late blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category.  Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.  Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on a Metis family.

A landless Metis citizen, she currently lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, the unceded territory of many Coast Salish nations, including the Qayqayt, Sto:lo, Tsawwassen,  Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie and Kwantlen.

Preview video:  vimeo.com/431650800

Website: Open Link