Stories hold the incredible power to heal wounds, connect people, and bridge generations. This is an incredibly important time to be centering the brilliance of our communities through Indigenous storytelling across diverse mediums. The Indigenous Brilliance Podcast is an important project of the larger Indigenous Brilliance Collective, and features innovative and exciting episodes, highlighting the multi-disciplinary voices of Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and Indigiqueer artists as we discuss cultural resurgence in Indigenous arts.
Hosted by creatives jaye simpson and Karmella Benedito De Barros, the Indigenous Brilliance Podcast carves out space for the celebration and witnessing of this beautifully visionary community.
In this episode of the Indigenous Brilliance Podcast, co-hosts jaye simpson, Karmella Cen Benedito De Barros and Emily Dundas Oke explore the topic of Indigenous Brilliance in poetry and writing through interviews with some recently published friends Selina Boan and Molly Cross-Blanchard! Click the following links to purchase their work from Massy Books
https://storestock.massybooks.com/?searchtype=keyword&qs=selina+&qs_file=&q=h.tviewer&using_sb=status&qsb=keyword
https://storestock.massybooks.com/?searchtype=keyword&qs=molly+cross&qs_file=&q=h.tviewer&using_sb=status&qsb=keyword
Tune in to hear what Selina and Molly are up to these days as we chat them up about publishing tips, book tour FOMO, community care, creative inspiration, pandemic life, futurisms and more. You’ll even get to hear each of these brilliant poets read some of their newly published work. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoy it!
Selina Boan is a poet living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She has been published extensively in literary magazines across Canada, won the Gold National Magazine Award for poetry in 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize. She is currently working on a collection of poems exploring her Cree and European heritage. “Here we go” and “the plot so far” are poems included in this collection and appear in Room’s “Let’s Make Contact” issue 40.4. The love and genuine care that is so evident in Selina’s poems she also puts into the work of the people around her. She champions emerging writers and her friends, and she attends to strengthening community building at every opportunity. Her work is powerful, necessary, and utterly brilliant, and she is very much deserving of Room’s Emerging Writer Award.
Molly Cross-Blanchard is a white and Métis poet living on Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish land. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and a BA in English from the University of Winnipeg. Her debut full-length collection of poetry, Exhibitionist, has just been published with Coach House Books this Spring 2021.
Music by Edzi’u and cover art by Sylvey Sampson <3
Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
1:47-32:43 – Selina
32:55 – 101:57 Molly
101:58 – 102:33 Close
[Audio transcription coming soon]