Francine Cunningham

Francine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist, and educator originally from Calgary, Alberta, but who currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. Francine is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing from The University of British Columbia. She also has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre from UBC. Her first book of poetry titled ON/me is out now with Caitlin Press.

Francine was the first place winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award in the Unpublished Prose English category, winner of Grain Magazine’s 2018 Short Forms Fiction Contest, short-listed for the 2018 The New Quarterly Review’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, short-listed for The Malahat Review’s 2019 Far Horizon’s Short Fiction Award, one of the 2017 Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award winners, and a recipient of a 2017 Telus StoryHive Grant for a web-series.

Francine has written for the APTN television show THAT’S AWSM and her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine, Echolocation Magazine, Litro Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The Maynard and more. Her choose your own adventure story The Slips appeared as part of the 2015 Active Fiction Project set on the streets of East Vancouver and is now available as an e-book from The Vancouver Public Library. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly Review, the anthology Boobs: women explore what it means to have breasts (Caitlin Press), The 2017 Best Canadian Essays, and more. 

Francine currently spends her time travelling across Canada working with youth and teaching writing workshops with an aim of getting students to create zines along with poetry workshops that focus on bringing her participants out into nature to create poetry that is inspired by their lives and the natural beauty around them. 

Francine is a Long Form National 2018 mentee and worked with Melanie Florence.