A writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation, Billy-Ray Belcourt is a rising literary star. His debut book of poetry, This Wound is a World, won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. His second collection of poems, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, and his collection of essays and vignettes, A History of My Brief Body, were both bestsellers.

Joining us livestreamed from Vancouver, Billy-Ray discusses his brilliant debut novel, A Minor Chorus. An incisive and moving exploration of what it means to be queer and Indigenous today. A Minor Chorus weaves conversations, interviews and stories of grief and survival in a North Alberta community with lyrical existential reflections. A Minor Chorus explores how the self is entangled with the social, the sayable with what remains unsaid, and how we can breach the prisons we live inside.

Billy-Ray is in conversation with Alyawarr scholar, Kathryn Gilbey.