Chelene Knight is the author of the Braided Skin (Mother Tongue 2015) the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award, and long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her novel, Junie (Book*hug 2022) is winner of the 2023 Vancouver Book Award, long-listed for the inaugural Carol Shields Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Prize for LGBTQ fiction. Her book of narrative nonfiction, Let It Go: Free Yourself From Old beliefs and Find a New Path To Joy is out with HarperCollins Canada. Chelene’s guided journal for writers is forthcoming with House of Anansi January 2025.
Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals, plus the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, and the Toronto Star.
Her work is anthologized in Making Room, Love Me True, Sustenance, The Summer Book, and Black Writers Matter, winner of the 2020 Saskatchewan Book Award. Her poem, “Welwitschia” won the 2020 CV2 Editor's Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM's 2021 short forms contest.
Knight was the previous managing editor at Room magazine, and the previous festival director for the Growing Room Festival in Vancouver and previously worked as a literary agent with the Transatlantic Agency. She has also worked as a professor of poetry at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. She is founder of The Forever Writers Club, a membership for writers focused on creative balance, and is now founder of her own coaching studio, Breathing Space Creative through which she’s launched the Thrive Coaching Program where busy professionals can learn how personal development creates the mindset needed to better manage their energy and make space for all the things they are passionate about.
Photo credit: Maxine Bulloch
Chelene’s Fave notebooks!! ↓
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