Sanita Fejzić is an award-winning Bosnian-Canadian writer. At the age of seven, after experiencing the Siege of Sarajevo, she fled the Balkan War and was a refugee across Europe for five years with her mother and brother. Her father, who was stuck in the longest siege of modern history, joined them years later. In 1997, her family moved to Ottawa, Canada, to be welcomed by the ice storm and soldiers from the Royal Regiment shoveling snow an uncanny and stressful first winter in the Great White North.

Her first book, Psychomachia, Latin for “battle of the soul,” was shortlisted for the 2015 Ken Klonsky Novella Prize and the 2018 Canada ReLit Awards. Her first play, The Blissful State of Surrender, was workshopped by the National Arts Centre in March 2018. A public reading of The Blissful State of Surrender (under the Direction of Janet Irwin) took place on June 9, 2019 from 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. at the Ottawa Arts Court as part of the TACTICS workshop series. A third, technical workshop took place virtually in April-May 2020, also as part of a TACTICS workshop series.

Fejzić has published her poetry and short stories in literary magazines across Canada. In November 2018, her poem, “(M)other” was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. A children’s book version of the poem was published by Le bouton d’or in English and French. (M)other has been translated into French by Sylvie Nicolas under the title Mère(s) et monde.

Fejzić is currently completing her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University specializing in the relationship between words and the way they open up possibilities for imagining new worlds. She asks the question: if it is true that we are in and of nature, deeply entangled with nonhuman beings, including animals, plants and elements such as water and land, then how has our language changed to reflect this reality?

Her essay about more-than-human responsibility, titled “Entangled Bodies in a Stubbornly Material-Textual World,” has been published in the February 2019 issue of the feminist magazine, Canthius . She has also published two anthologies of essays, prose, poetry and art as co-editor, including Refuge(e) (with Lise Rochefort) in 2016 and Dis(s)ent in 2018 (with guest editor George Elliott Clarke).