Michele Genest

Featured Writer

Michele Genest moved to Whitehorse in 1994, and is grateful to live, work and harvest on the traditional territories of several Yukon Indigenous peoples. She has written plays, fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and northern cookbooks. Her play, The Fasting Girl, won Best Play in Nakai Theatre’s 1997 24-hour Playwriting Competition and was produced by Nakai in 1998. She received the Ma Murray Award for arts and cultural journalism in 2000; a 2011 Taste Canada Silver Award for her cookbook, The Boreal Gourmet (Harbour Publishing, 2010) and a Gold Medal in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Awesome Ancient Grains and Seeds, co-authored with Dan Jason (Douglas and McIntyre, 2018). With Dianne Homan and Jenny Charchun she edited two anthologies of Yukon writing, Urban Coyote and Urban Coyote, New Territory (2001 and 2003, Lost Moose.) She’s honoured to be part of the Yukon Words Festival and fired up to explore Writing the North.