About Me

Leesa Dean was born in Northern British Columbia and raised in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. She spent a decade in Montreal where she studied Creative Writing at Concordia University before moving to Toronto where she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. She also lived on random farms and beaches and rode her bicycle across Canada before eventually settling in Krestova, BC, where she still lives on an acreage with her artist husband Matty Kakes and daughter Scarlett Heart. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Selkirk College since 2015 where she is co-founder of the West Kootenay's only literary magazine, The Black Bear Review, a vital platform for emerging writers.

Her writing has been nominated for literary awards such as the Trillium and ReLit Awards, the Irving Layton Award, and the Litpop Award. In 2022, she was a finalist in the Diagram Chapbook Contest, shortlisted for the Nick Blatchord Occasional Verse Contest, and in 2023 she was runner-up for the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. Aside from writing, she is deeply engaged with her local arts community where she has volunteered for the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival for a decade, offers community workshops, and supports other bookish events.

Her critically acclaimed short story collection, Waiting for the Cyclone, was published by Brindle & Glass in October 2016. Her poetry chapbook The Desert of Itabira was published by above/ground press in January 2020, and her novella in verse, The Filling Station, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2022. Her chapbook, Apogee/Perigee, was published in 2023 and has become the foundational text for a popular two hour poetry workshop based on Vedic astrology and positions of the moon as a praxis for exploring the self. She is currently working on a contemporary gothic romance novel that takes place in her home region of the West Kootenay. She is represented by Samantha Haywood at the Transatlantic Literary Agency.