Drew Hayden Taylor
Halloween is a good time to write about the work of Drew Hayden Taylor, especially his YA novel The Night Wanderer: a native Gothic Novel. Published in 2007 by Annick Press, this book has layers for the mature reader as well as the younger one.
Drew Hayden Taylor is an Ojibwa from the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario. He has travelled widely and worked as a journalist, playwright, script and documentary writer, comedian and more.
Taylor is an excellent performer. After hearing him at the Sunshine Coast Festival, I simply had to buy and read the book he read from. Like any good comedian, he points to unpalatable truths and then makes us laugh at them.
The blue-eyed Taylor, who describes himself as "pretty like a white boy" also has a very long list of plays to his credit. His film and television credits include numerous documentaries as well as episodes of North of Sixty and Corner Gas and much more. He has been featured on CBC a number of times and had his short stories dramatized for Between the Covers.
In addition to his theatre and novel credits, he has contributed to an impressive list of periodicals including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Nativebeat, Canadian Geographic and the Utne Reader. He has been Writer-in-Residence in Canada, the US and Germany.
His 21st book, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass (Random House, 2010) was nominated for the Governor General's Award for fiction. News, Postcards from Four Directions was published the same year by Talonbooks.