Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario. Her writing has been published most recently in Room, Grain and The New Quarterly. Her essay A Mind Spread Out on the Groundin The Malahat Reviewwon gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017. She turned the essay into a full-length collection of the same name, offering a wide-ranging look at the personal and political connections betweenthe legacy of colonialism with intergenerational trauma, racism, mental health and poverty.

CBC Books named Elliott a writer to watch in 2019.

• Why Alicia Elliott challenges us all to think critically about trauma, oppression and racism in Canada
• Living with lice for a decade became a metaphor for the shame of poverty, says writer Alicia Elliott
• 19 emerging Canadian writers to watch in 2019

Books by Alicia Elliott

Why Alicia Elliott wroteA Mind Spread Out on the Ground

"I hope that the book makes people think more critically about how they got to where they are. There's this notion that people are the result of their own actions and to a degree that's true. But there are also ways where you aren't always in control of how you got to where you are.

I hope that the book makes people think more critically about how they got to where they are.- Alicia Elliott

"How parents get to where they are and how does that impact you? How did their views impact how you saw the world? Didthe circumstances that their own parents were in affectthem and how did that affect you? I want people to think more critically about circumstances, histories and systems of discrimination and how they bear down upon individuals as opposed to thinking about these things as abstract concepts.

"When you think about racism, colonialism ortransphobia, these are these big words that don't necessarily mean something physical, but I want to be grounded in individual experiences. I want people to think about how they are grounded in their individual experiences."

Read more in her interview with CBC Books.

Interviews with Alicia Elliott

More aboutA Mind Spread Out on the Ground