Writer, teacher, mental health advocate.

Kathy Friedman’s first collection of short stories, All the Shining People (Anansi, 2022), was shortlisted for Trillium Book Award, Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Kathy studied creative writing at UBC and the University of Guelph, and she was a finalist for the 2012 Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Grain, Geist, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, and Canadian Notes & Queries. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about travel, music, and mental health.

A full-time professor in Humber College’s Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program, Kathy has been teaching creative writing to diverse adult communities for the last decade through NISA/Northern Institute for Social Action, Workman Arts, The 519, Progress Place, CAMH, and the Toronto Public Library.

Kathy is also the co-founder and former artistic director of InkWell Workshops, which delivers free literary programming to people with mental health and addiction issues. She is the publisher of four anthologies with in-house imprint InkWell Books, and she edited the anthology Brilliance Is the Clothing I Wear, published by Dundurn Press in June 2021. Quill & Quire called this latest anthology a “polished, triumphant collection.”

Kathy emigrated with her family from South Africa to Thornhill, Ontario, when she was five. She now lives in Toronto, an uninvited guest on the shared Ancestral territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit and other Anishinaabe Nations, as well as the Wendat and other Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She endeavours to live in right relation with the land and its original inhabitants and caretakers, and to uphold the values embedded in the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Treaty.