GWEN BENAWAY won the gold medal in the personal journalism category at the 42nd annual National Magazine Awards for her essay A Body Like a Home, Hazlitt, May 30, 2018. Gwen has just completed her first year in the PhD Programme, and is the recipient of the Faculty of Arts & Science Recognition of Excellence Award in 2018-2019.
Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent and a Ph.D student at the University of Toronto in the Women & Gender Studies Institute. She has published three collections of poetry and numerous essays. Her creative and scholarly writing has been critically acclaimed and published internationally. She was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ writers from the Writer’s Trust of Canada, the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry, and the Ontario Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her scholarly work focuses on transsexual embodiment, the poetics of liberation, and feminist philosophy. In 2019, she was awarded a Fellowship from the Transgender Archive at the University of Victoria and will be doing archival research there to support her dissertation. Gwen’s dissertation project is tentatively titled: Make Room in the Mouth for Grasses: Refusing Recognition in Indigenous Trans Formations of Liberatory Life.