Jessica Johns

Jessica Johns is a queer nehiyaw aunty and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. She is an interdisciplinary artist and award-winning writer whose debut novel, Bad Cree, was a Canada Reads finalist and won the WGA Fiction Prize, Alex Award, and MacEwan Book of the Year Prize.

Jessica's curated events are:

Reimagining Resistance Beyond Colonies

Burial Grounds: Indigenous Perspectives on Horror

Sintering: An Evening of Indigenous Brilliance

Jessica Johns is appearing in the following events:

Opening Night: Visions & Revisions

Join us to open the 2026 Festival and celebrate 40 years of Melbourne Writers Festival.

Thu 7 May 6:30pm @ Athenaeum Theatre

Burial Grounds: Indigenous Perspectives on Horror

Horror is hardly a genre that needs much introduction – graveyards, monsters, things that go bump in the night. But what is at the heart of horror and stories of the uncanny for Indigenous Peoples, when colonisation is as horrific as humanity gets? What does a history unburied look like in the light?

Sat 9 May 2:30pm @ The Wheeler Centre

Sintering: An Evening of Indigenous Brilliance

From poetry, to fiction, to nonfiction, to everything outside of and in-between, this event is a celebration of the encompassing, expansive, and uncontained way we know Indigenous brilliance, globally and locally, to exist.

Sat 9 May 6:30pm @ The Wheeler Centre

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