^{photo: Justin Black}

Catherine Black is a Toronto-born writer, Associate Professor, co-founder and Chair of the Creative Writing BFA program at OCAD University. She is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA writing program. Black is a writer and visual storyteller whose practice spans prose poetry, lyric essay, interdisciplinary writing, and literary fiction. Her first collection of prose poetry, Lessons of Chaos and Disaster, was the second book in Guernica Edition’s “First Poets Series.” Her lyric nonfiction novella, A Hard Gold Thread, was nominated for the ReLit Award, and her third book, a collection of prose poems entitled Bewilderness, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her first novel, Blessed Nowhere, won the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction, has been optioned for film, and adapted into a screenplay. Black recently completed a month-long artist residency in Mexico City where she was working on an interdisciplinary nonfiction novella concerned with motherhood, creativity, wanderlust and rootedness.