Francine Cunningham is an award-winning writer, artist and educator who spends her summer days writing on the prairie’s and her winter months teaching in the north. Francine is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta but grew up in Calgary, Edmonton, and 100 Mile House, BC. Francine is also Metis, and has settler family roots stretching from as far away as Ireland and Belgium. She currently resides in Alberta but previously spent over a decade calling Vancouver her home. 

 

Her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for The BC and Yukon Book Prize, The Indigenous Voices Award, and The Vancouver Book Award. Her debut book of short stories God Isn’t Here Today (Invisible Publishing) is out now and is a book of speculative fiction and horror and was long-listed for the inaugural Carol Shield’s Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award, and won the 2023 ReLit award for Short Fiction. Her first children’s book What if Bedtime Didn’t Exist? (Annick Press) was released in March 2024 and was a TD Summer Reads official selection. Her second kids book, Hunting for a Hoot, is forthcoming from Annick Press in 2026. 

 

Francine also writes for television with credits including the teen reality show THAT’S AWSM!, and the episodic nature documentary Animal Nation, she was also a recipient of a Telus StoryHive grant to make a web-series. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have also appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories, The Best Canadian Non-Fiction, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist twice, and on the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist among others.

 

Francine was the 2023/2024 Writer in Residence at the University of Calgary in their Distinguished Writer In Residence Program. She was also the writer in Residence at The Wallace Stegner House in Eastend Saskatchewan, and at The Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon in fall/winter of 2024. 

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Currently Francine is working with the Canada Council for the Arts as the Southern Alberta Arts Liaison Consultant as part of their Alberta Focus Initiative. 

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She is also hard at work on her next work of fiction and is excited to share this special story with the world soon.