Carleigh Baker

Carleigh Baker is a nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân / Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwu7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. She is a 2020 Shadbolt Fellow working with SFU Galleries. A graduate of the University of British Columbia's creative writing program, Baker has focused on issues of Indigenous representation in the arts, and ways in which Indigenous voices and bodies are displaced by well-intentioned, non-Indigenous activists. Baker is also the 2019 / 2020 Ellen and Warren Tallman writer-in-residence in the Department of English at SFU.

Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays, The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Journey Prize Stories. She also writes reviews for The Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017) won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writer's Trust Fiction Prize, the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction and the BC Book Prize Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award. Her novel-in-progress, The Matriarchs, is about endangered rivers and problematic mothers. Set in the Peel River Watershed, the traditional territory of the Na-Cho Nyak Dun, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Vuntut Gwitchin, and Tetlit Gwich’in peoples, the story revolves around a group of conservationists and filmmakers who set out to "save the Peel" but end up needing to save themselves.