Non-Fiction

Claire Johnston is a Red River Métis and settler visual artist based in Winnipeg/Treaty 1 Territory. As a Two-Spirit Piitoshi-iteeyihtam (one who thinks differently), Claire engages in creating slow meticulous floral beadwork that responds relationally to the past and present.

Claire is an artist and team member with the Re*Storying Autism project (Queen's University), which works to combat Western, colonial, capitalist, and biomedical understandings of Autism through Autistic storytelling and narratives that affirm difference as desirable and needed.

As part of Canada’s official entry to the 2025 Venice Biennale, Claire was selected as a fellow to engage in research on Venetian seed beads and their connection to Métis beadworkers past and present. Their artwork has been acquired by permanent collections at the University of Manitoba (2024) and has exhibited at Urban Shaman (Winnipeg 25’), Rosemary Gallery (Winnipeg 24’), Tangled Arts (Toronto 22’, 24’), Festival du Voyageur (Winnipeg 24’), Venice Biennale of Architecture (Venice 23’) and The Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art (Vancouver 22’).

Claire is a Sundancer, a step-parent, an auntie, and an MMF citizen with membership with the Two-Spirit Michif Local.

Nora Decter is a writer and educator who grew up on Treaty 1 Territory in the North End of Winnipeg. She is the author of two novels: How Far We Go and How Fast (Orca Book Publishers, 2018) and What's Not Mine (ECW Press, 2024). In 2019 she was the recipient of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction.

Nora has been teaching writing at post-secondary institutions in the U.S. and Canada for the last ten years. She was honoured to serve as the 2024-2025 writer-in-residence at the Winnipeg Public Library, where she worked with a record number of writers from across Manitoba.

She lives in Winnipeg, near the foot of Garbage Hill.