Kayla Czaga
Position
Sessional Instructor
Writing
Credentials
BA (UVic), MFA (UBC)
Area of expertise
Poetry.
Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat, B.C. before moving south to study creative writing. Her debut collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014) won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. It was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019), also a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, was described by poet David O’Meara as “sparkling with recollection’s rich details…exhilarating.” Her poems have appeared in Maisonneuve, The Ex-Puritan, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, and have been selected six times for inclusion in The Best Canadian Poetry in English series. Individual poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, ARC Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for poetry, and CV2’s Lina Chartrand Award. Her third collection, Midway, will be released by House of Anansi in 2024.