Born in 1991, Natasha Kanape Fontaine is Innu, originally from Pessamit on Quebec's North Shore. Poet-performer, actor, visual artist, and activist for Indigenous and environmental rights, she lives in Montreal. Her first collection of poems, Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes (translated by Howard Scott; Mawenzi House, 2015), recounts her initial identity questioning and was hailed by critics, earning her the 2013 Prix litteraire des Ecrivains francophones d'Amerique. A finalist at the 2015 Prix Emile-Nelligan, her second collection Assi Manifesto (Mawenzi House, 2016) offers a song to our planet Earth, suffocating as a result of the exploitation of natural resources, of tar sands in particular. Her third collection of poetry, Blueberries and Apricots (Mawenzi House, 2018) carries "the speech of the Indigenous woman, coming back to life to reverse history."
