Carleigh Baker is an author and teacher of Cree-Métis and European descent. Born and raised on Stó:lō territory, she currently lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwəta (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. Her short stories and essays have been translated into several languages, and anthologized in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her new story collection, Last Woman, is out now with McClelland & Stewart.
Witty, irreverent, and full of heart, these stories address contemporary issues such as climate change, late-stage capitalism, and gentrification. With equal parts compassion and critique, she brings her clear-eyed attention to bear on our world, and the results are hilarious, heartbreaking, and startling in their freshness. A woman’s dream of poetic solitude turns out to be a recipe for loneliness. A retiree is convinced that his silence is the only thing that will prevent a deadly sinkhole. A young woman finds sisterhood in a strange fertility ritual, and an enigmatic empath is on a cleanse.
Baker’s characters are both wildly misguided and a product of the misguided times in which we live. Through them we see our world askew and skewered—and perhaps, we can begin to see it anew.
