photograph by Erin Flegg

Kayla Czaga holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and currently serves as the online poetry mentor for Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. 

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 Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019), also a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, was described by David O’Meara as “sparkling with recollection’s rich details…exhilarating.” Her third collection, Midway, will be published by House of Anansi in spring 2024. 

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. 

Czaga lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen People (Victoria, B.C).