Ivan COYOTE
ONE IN EVERY CROWD—stories to foster safety and social justice in our schools for everyone
Author and storyteller Ivan Coyote was born and raised in a large Irish Catholic family in Whitehorse, Yukon, and learned the craft of storytelling while gathered around her grandmother’s kitchen table on long northern winter nights. Ivan is the award-winning author of six collections of short stories, one novel, three screenplays and three CD’s, and a renowned live performer. Her work tackles the difficult subjects of family, class, gender identity, and social justice, always with the silver tongue of a master storyteller, an eye for the beauty found in what makes us all human, and an ear for the hilarity of life and love. Ivan’s first love is telling stories to a live audience, and over the last sixteen years she has become an audience favourite at writer’s, storytelling, poetry, spoken word, and music festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam. Because much of her material grapples with her life in between gender boxes, she is also often asked to speak to labour activists, social justice advocates, university and high school students, health care providers and teachers all across the continent. The Globe and Mail called Ivan “a natural-born storyteller” and Ottawa X Press said “Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture.” Toronto Star praises Coyote’s “talent for sketching the bizarre in the everyday”, and Quills Magazine says Ivan has a “distinctive and persuasive voice, a flawless sense of pacing, and an impeccable sense of story.”