The Turning of the Wheel

Jónína Kirton

Jónína Kirton is a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet and a graduate of the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio, where she is their BIPOC Auntie supporting and mentoring BIPOC students. A late-blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an emerging artist in the Literary Arts category. Her first collection of poetry, Page as Bone — Ink as Blood, was released with Talonbooks in 2015. Joanne Arnott described this collection as “restorative, intimate poetry, drawing down ancestral ideas into the current moment’s breath.” Kirton’s second collection, An Honest Woman, was released in 2017 with Talonbooks. It was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Betsy Warland had this to say about An Honest Woman: “Kirton picks over how she was raised familially and culturally like a crime scene.” She is currently working on her third book, a poetic memoir, Standing in a River of Time, which will be released in 2022 with Talonbooks.