Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her visual art has been exhibited in galleries and cultural institutions across Canada and the US.
Gibson’s debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019), is currently on curriculum readings lists across the country. This genre blurring collection is Gibson’s creative response to her own encounters with racism in the classroom. How She Read won the 2020 Pat Lowther Award and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021), was nominated for the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and named one of CBC’s Best Books of 2021. This graphic response to the year 2020 brings a critical lens to the historical representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media.
Recipient of the 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Canada’s most prestigious post-secondary teaching award, Gibson teaches writing and design communication at Simon Fraser University.
Purchase Chantal Gibson’s book with/holding here: caitlin-press.com/our-books/with-holding/