Jordan Abel

Jordan Abel is a Nisga'a author and scholar whose experimental work spans poetry, prose, and visual art. Empty Spaces (2024) won the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction. Abel's work is characterised by its use of erasure, collage, and appropriation as methods for interrogating colonial texts and reclaiming Indigenous histories. Abel's earlier poetry collections include The Place of Scraps (2013), un/inhabited (2014), and Injun (2016), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize for a Canadian poet. His work consistently engages with the violence embedded in colonial language and literature, often by taking that language apart and rebuilding it. Empty Spaces is an autofictional reckoning with intergenerational trauma, the body, and memory, using typography and negative space as expressive elements. Abel is an associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University and is considered one of the most formally innovative writers working in Canada today.