Meet Chelene Knight: SFU Library’s 2024 Non-Fiction Writer in Residence
Arts + Culture, Media + Information, 2024, Transform the SFU Experience, Make a Difference for B.C.
This event featured SFU Library's 2024 Writer-in-Residence Chelene Knight, along with past Writers-in-Residence Angela Sterritt (2023) and Eternity Martis (2022). The three writers had a casual and candid chat as they shared their insights into the art of writing and the joy of living their creative lives to the fullest.
About the SFU Library Non-Fiction Writer in Residence program
This residency celebrates the power of non-fiction writing to share knowledge beyond academia, enhancing the SFU community's capacity to tell compelling research and scholarship stories. As the 2024 Writer-in-Residence, Chelene Knight will deliver workshops for the SFU community on non-fiction writing for the public, offer opportunities for feedback on writing projects, and showcase the power of non-fiction writing.
This was an online event.
Chelene Knight
Chelene Knight is a writer, editor, teacher, and writing coach. Her books include the memoir Dear Current Occupant (winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award), the novel Junie (winner of the 2023 Vancouver Book Award, and finalist for multiple other awards), and the narrative non-fiction book Let it Go: Free Yourself from Old Beliefs and Find a New Path to Joy (coming out January 2024). Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals, as well as The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and the Toronto Star.
Angela Sterritt
Angela Sterritt is an award-winning investigative journalist and national bestselling author from the Wilp Wiik’aax (we-GAK) of the Gitanmaax (GIT-in-max) community within the Gitxsan (GICK-san) Nation on her dad’s side and from Bell Island Newfoundland on her maternal side. Sterritt worked as a television, radio, and digital journalist at CBC for more than a decade. She hosted the award-winning CBC original podcast Land Back.
Her book Unbroken, a work that is part memoir and part investigation into the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls, published by Greystone Books became an instant national bestseller in May of 2023. Unbroken was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. It is also nominated for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust award for best non-fiction book in Canada.
Angela was the 2023 SFU Library Non-Fiction Writer in Residence.
Eternity Martis
Eternity Martis (she/her) is a multi award–winning journalist and editor and an assistant professor of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. She was the senior editor and health editor at Xtra magazine and helped to lead the publication into an award-winning, digital magazine following the closure of its print edition. Eternity's writing on race and gender has appeared in over 30 publications including Vice, the Huffington Post, The Walrus, Hazlitt, The Fader, Complex, Chatelaine, Maclean’s and Salon, where her essay on race and belonging was selected by Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay to be part of her series.
Eternity has influenced media style guides around Canada to capitalize "Black" and "Indigenous" including tvo.org, the Toronto Star, Xtra and the Review of Journalism, where she also co-founded the Review’s first podcast, Offleash. Her bestselling memoir They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up won the 2021 Kobo Emerging Writer prize and was a finalist for the Evergreen Award. Eternity was the Journalist in Residence (2021) and Asper Visiting Professor (2021) at UBC, and the 2022 Non-Fiction Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University.
Accessibility
Closed captioning in English was available. The event was recorded.
Technology
To engage in this online event, attendees needed a computer (laptop or desktop), tablet or smartphone, with speakers or headphones.
We recommended that they use a computer for the best experience of this event.
Protecting your privacy
This event was recorded, but only the speakers will be visible in the published recording.
To ensure that we used online event technology in a privacy-conscious way, we followed best practices for this online event series:
- We only circulated the event link to those who are registered for the event
- We password-protected the event
- We enabled end-to-end encryption
- We did not use attention tracking
If you have any questions about this event’s accessibility, technology requirements or privacy, please connect with us at psqevent@sfu.ca.