Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal (she/her) is a writer, facilitator, former lawyer and critical race feminist who grew up in an immigrant household on the traditional, present, and future territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen and Musqueam First Nations (Surrey and North Delta, BC). She has spent over two decades using arts-based methodologies to explore justice, healing, community-building and transformation, offering creative workshops across communities and institutions on Turtle Island. Her work asks how language so often used to colonize, flatten and desensitize might instead bring us back to ourselves, oneness and each other.

Before pursuing writing full-time, Preeti completed her JD and BCL at McGill, articled at a boutique litigation firm and clerked at the Federal Court of Canada. She later completed a Master of Laws at UVic, using theatre and performance art to explore how law lives in the body with a focus on race and the Komagata Maru. While earning her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she taught social justice and creative writing, deepening her commitment to hybridity, form and embodied pedagogy. She has received over two dozen awards for community service and academic excellence, including the DF Forster Award, and is grateful to have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and BC Arts Council. She is the current poet in residence at Upstart & Crow and an alumna of Banff Centre, Deer Lake and Voices of Our Nation (VONA).

Preeti’s creative writing explores touch, grief, power, prayer, love, sexuality and the everyday lives of diasporic Punjabi people. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Humber Literary Review, Looseleaf, Held Magazine, Arc Poetry, and ti-TCR, amongst numerous other publications. She recently completed a poetry manuscript about a queer-platonic relationship with the goddess of grief and is now editing a novella in verse and re-engaging with an old novel manuscript about a special crow. What else? She loves moss and the ocean, grapples with chronic illness, and firmly believes that stories change the world by altering our ways of seeing, feeling and being with one another and the planet. To check out her workshops or learn more: @write.with.preeti (IG) or https://linktr.ee/Jadooberry.