Tanis MacDonald is a professor, essayist, writer of poetry, memoir, fiction, creative nonfiction, and host of the podcast Watershed Writers. She is creator of the ‘memoir via instruction’, Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City, Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, and, with Ariel Gordon and Rosanna Deerchild, was co-editor of the multi-genre anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times. Her book The Daughter’s Way was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Tessera, Prairie Fire, Studies in Canadian Literature, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The New Quarterly, and in Far and Wide: Essays from Across Canada, and the anthology Far Villages. She is the author of three books of poetry, including, most recently, Mobile, which was longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards.

She is the winner of the Bliss Carman Prize and the Mayor’s Poetry City Prize for Waterloo. She has taught at the Sage Hill Writing Experience and won the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award from the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs. Originally from Winnipeg, she teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.

Tanis’ appearance is supported by Author Patrons Book Group 1964

Appearing in WR2. The Truth about Bodies in Motion