Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Ivan E. Coyote is an award-winning author of five collections of short stories, one novel, two CDs, four short films and a renowned performer who recently relocated to Vancouver from Ottawa. Her first novel, Bow Grip, was released in the fall of 2006, and was awarded the Relit award for best fiction and named by the American Library Association as a Stonewall honor book in literature. Her fifth collection of stories, The Slow Fix, was released in September of 2008, and was nominated for a Lambda award. Ivan is a long-time columnist for Xtra! in Toronto and Xtra! West in Vancouver, writes regularly for The Georgia Straight and CBC Radio, and pops up in periodicals all across the continent.

But Ivan’s first love is live storytelling, and over the last fifteen years she has become an audience favorite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam. Ivan was a founding member of the performance collective Taste This and its current (re)iteration, SweLL.

Ivan recently completed an eight-month writer in residence at Carleton University in Ottawa, and has taught numerous workshops in such diverse venues as Banff Centre for the Arts, Camp Fyrefly, Capilano College Continuing Education, Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture, and Victoria School of Writing. Her anti-bullying talks are appropriate for middle schools, high schools, universities and community centers world-wide.