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In-person Arts & Culture

Partnered Event: Close Encounters of the Native Kind with Cody Caetano

Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025
12:00pm to 1:00pm

Part of: LitFest

University of Alberta

books talks networking festivals

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Organized by: LitFest

Oct.
15

Close Encounters of the Native Kind explores boundaries between storytelling traditions, material and speculative realities, and what’s said and unsaid in the growing native literary tradition.

This talk maps the evolution of this tradition through a framework of waves: from reflection and refraction to diffraction and, now, to a fourth wave of interference. This new wave of Indigenous literature is defined by its transcendence of material realism, in exchange for a more embodied, phenomenological truth. Through a lens that is both critical and personal, and informed by my dual role as a writer and literary agent, the talk examines how this shift challenges the market’s expectations of an “Indigenous Voice.”

CODY CAETANO is the author of Half-Bads in White Regalia (Canada: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2022), winner of two Indigenous Voices Awards, shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and longlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and Canada Reads. An off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation, his mother’s family is from the Manitoba Interlake and his father’s family emigrated to Canada from the Azores in the 1960s. He works as a literary agent at CookeMcDermid.

University of Alberta

Henderson Hall

11011 88 Avenue
Edmonton, AB, T6G 2G5