JEN FERGUSON (she/her/hers) is Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and Creative Writing. Her debut young adult novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet (Heartdrum/HarperCollins), won a 2022 Govenor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book, among other accolades. Her other YA novels include Those Pink Mountain Nights, a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection with four starred reviews, and A Constellation of Minor Bears. Her novella “Missing” won the Malahat Review’s 2022 Novella Prize and her essay “Off Balance” was selected for the Best Canadian Essays 2020. Jen lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Meskwaki, the Báxoje and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ nations, and teaches fiction writing at Coe College.