Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer and editor from Six Nations of the Grand River. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She’s had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, and her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold. Her short fiction has been included in Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and Journey Prize Stories. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as a recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out on The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.

She is currently creative nonfiction editor at The Fiddlehead, associate nonfiction editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly.

Her latest book is her fiction debut, And Then She Fell, a gripping novel about Indigeneity, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences. Author Eden Robinson praises Alicia’s “meticulous prose,” calling it “an agile portal through the narrator’s complex inner life, the tensions, and fractures that surface when the trappings of success hide the weight of intergenerational trauma, racism, sexism, and the unwieldy expectations of Motherhood. And Then She Fell saves us from devastation by the grace it shows its characters.” Heather O’Neill calls it “shocking, riveting, uncomfortable, gorgeous and visionary. Alicia Elliott destabilizes the reader and forces them to confront the horror of otherness. The cannibalism of Indigenous culture by academia is portrayed in a grotesque tableau that rivals the worlds of Jordan Peele…  Elliott’s true gift to the reader is a new perspective on Indigeneity which is both humbling and earth-shattering.”

Alicia lives in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child.

Appearing in 21. Cracks in the Foundation