Cecily Nicholson is rural, small-town Ontario via Toronto and South Bend, relocated to the Pacific Coast now almost two decades. On Musqueam-, Squamish-, and Tsleil-Waututh-occupied lands known as Vancouver, she worked for many years in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. A part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and a member of the Research Ethics Board for Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Cecily was also the 2017 Ellen Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Triage, From the Poplars, winner of the 2015 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Poetry.