Brandi Bird is IndigiNews’s new audience engagement editor. Photo by David P. Ball

IndigiNews is thrilled to introduce readers to our new audience engagement editor, Brandi Bird! Some of you may already be familiar with Brandi Bird, The Poet—their debut poetry collection The All + Flesh, released in 2023, has been widely acclaimed in the literary space including getting a finalist nomination for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry.

So, it’s thrilling that Brandi is bringing their communications and editing skills to this brand new role at IndigiNews. They are already working to find new ways to engage with you, our readers, while contributing to the overall creative vision at IndigiNews and our parent company tâpwêwin media.

Read on to hear more about what draws them to the journalism world, their love of “terrible and uncool” media, cats—and how they describe themselves as “a clown, but in an old-timey pantomime kind of way.”

I’ll start by letting you introduce yourself! Where are you from?

Hello and it’s nice to introduce myself to our IndigiNews readers! My name is Brandi Bird and I’m the new audience engagement editor. I’m Cree, Saulteaux and Métis from Treaty 1 territory but I’ve spent a significant part of my life on Haudenosaunee land (Montreal) and I’ve been living on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory (Vancouver) for a decade now.

I spent the first 20 years of my life roaming around the streets of Winnipeg and I’ve experienced all the love and heartbreak that comes with being Indigenous in such a wonderful and complicated city. One day I’d like to return home more permanently but, like a lot of Queer Indigenous people, I escaped to bigger cities where I thought I could reinvent myself.

I wanted to become someone more disconnected from who I always knew I was. I joke about how I’m a “reconnecting” Indigenous person only because I purposefully tried to distance myself from my past when I moved to Montreal as an adult. That distancing happened because I internalized the implicit attitudes of the people around me in the places I was often brought into as a token. I bring a unique perspective to this role at IndigiNews because I’m a decisive person with strong opinions and I trust my skills. However—I still strive to listen to what my communities need from me and I know the multiplicities of those communities are what makes relationality an endless and humbling practice. I’m excited to support the award-winning journalists at IndigiNews, as well as our readers, in this new role!

You are so accomplished in the creative writing space. What drew you to journalism and specifically this role you just started?

I finished my MFA in Creative Writing at UBC in June of 2025 and was in a state of creative and academic burn out. It was the kind of burn out that only comes from knowing I was stepping into an uncertain professional world with thousands of other unemployed people in the same position as myself.

What was so refreshing about applying to IndigiNews was that the application process mirrored the ethos of tâpwêwin media. All my communication felt concerned with personality fit and my own values beyond just my demonstrated skills. After all, my skills and experience in communications roles are comparable to thousands of other people looking for similar jobs every day. I knew as soon as I sat down with Eden Fineday at my first interview that I was speaking to someone with deep care and concern for creating and supporting great journalism and, more importantly, good relationships with the communities we serve. Journalism is also a form of storytelling and I respect the power independent storytelling has in the publishing monopoly of Canadian media. I’m most excited about collaborating with the larger staff at IndigiNews to expand our reach and our expertise.

What are some things you’re hoping to achieve as our first audience engagement editor—what are you excited about?

I’m hoping to standardize and cement a model for this position. I want to create a strong foundation for IndigiNews moving forward so that anyone with my position could at least function at the bare minimum without me around for a while!

I’m busy right now learning the role and taking note of what will support me in the future. This learning includes the boring and seemingly redundant work of creating my own job manuals and organizational systems that will be living documents while I’m in this position. As for more exciting and public facing work, I’m excited to redesign and update copy on the IndigiNews website and complete the small steps that will make our Big Picture Plans come to fruition sooner rather than later. I want to push for more shortform and longform video content and more capacity for arts and opinion pieces.

My dream is to help create a new generation of critics in North America that are explicitly concerned with Indigenous peoples and our voices and experiences. But, for the time being, I know that the most important lesson I’ve learned from being a good relative is that every push forward into the future requires doing the dirty, unseen work in the background first. You can’t make the meal until the dishes from lunch and breakfast are done!

You’ve published one book of poetry, have a second one in the works and are working on your first novel—how has that process been for you?

My artistic voice is very different from my professional one. They both require different parts of my brain and my being. I think the only thing they have in common is a concern for the audience I’m trying to reach. My second book of poetry, Pitiful (House of Anansi, 2026), comes out on April 7th and I’m gearing up for a book tour where I’ll be reading all these very vulnerable poems about my recovery from eating disorders as an Indigenous person.

I wrote this book with an extreme amount of candor because it’s a subject I haven’t seen written about from a perspective like mine before. It felt very urgent to write about my own desire and appetites in this specific moment in our time and history. My novel feels the same way. I’m writing a very dark satire about obsession and mimicry. I’m still in the drafting process but I’m having a lot of fun with it!

How would you describe yourself as a storyteller?

My favourite thing to do is make people laugh. I have a bad habit of telling stories about myself that don’t always portray me in the best light because I know they’ll put a smile on my friends’ faces. My first book of poetry didn’t have much of my humor in it because I was struggling with the expectation of being a serious Indigenous poet when I wrote the bulk of those poems. In Pitiful, there’s so much more of my silliness even though the book is much darker and stranger than The All + Flesh ever was. I don’t think the majority of people think of traditional stories as capable of being funny. Or traditional languages. I know way more vocabulary to talk about and describe dog poop in Saulteaux than I do for all the different kinds of love we feel. Indigenous people are way funnier than people give us credit for. In short, I’d say I’m a clown but in an old-timey pantomime kind of way. A clown that tries to scare you into laughter despite yourself.

You are such a cat person! And you have two feline children. Tell us more about that. What do you like about them?

My ancient Golden Girls, my Babydoll, Burt and Etta, all chose to die in the same six month period in 2024. So I had a cat-less home while me and my partner grieved the loss of our elderly felines. I had the honor of loving Babydoll for 18 years! Eventually, me and my partner decided to try to heal our hearts and take in cats for people experiencing housing precarity in Vancouver.

We fostered four cats in about eight months and then we were offered two bonded sister kittens that were rescued in northern B.C. They’re eight months old now and they are my delightful but troublesome daughters. When they were given their vaccinations and spayed at around six months old, their vet told me that Jude, our tuxedo girl, was very smart and would get into a lot of mischief because of her intelligence. But then the vet got silent for a few moments, as if she had realised she had forgotten about Margot, our calico kitten, and was desperately trying to figure out how to best compliment her. She eventually settled on “Margot…she’s so…sweet.” Yeah! She sure is!

What are some of your hobbies and interests outside of work?

I’m a big fan of consuming terrible and uncool media. I don’t have guilty pleasures. My joy is not experienced through a lens of irony. I’m serious about my own pleasure. For example, I watch the ABC first responder procedural 9-1-1 live every Thursday with deep passion and sincerity. I then engage in an analysis of the latest episode with a select committee of 2SLGBTQ people on the internet with a particular attention to my favourite fictional firefighter, Mr. Evan “Buck” Buckley.

Perhaps more respectfully, I’m planning on taking harp lessons soon and I love to dance although I have no rhythm. I’m attempting to rectify my lack of rhythm by taking classes in ballet and floor work choreography at a local and Queer-inclusive, gender and body diverse dance studio, but I don’t seem to be getting any more graceful. I also love doing pilates, especially reformer pilates, because I take pride in being the fattest person in the room. I’m also challenging myself to “shop” in my own wardrobe and putting together outfits I wouldn’t have thought to wear before. I grew up very active in fashion livejournal communities and on blogspot and I’ve always been committed to using clothes as self-expression instead of ways to hide who I am.

Now that I’ve finished six years of continuous full-time academics while juggling various jobs at the same time, I’m excited to try out the hobbies I left behind to focus on keeping my head above water. Things like designing and making puppets and reading for enjoyment rather than analysis or my craft as a writer. I want to build up my collage supplies again and write silly essays for my personal substack and maybe try an Improv class so I can get humbled by an intensely charismatic 21 year old simply because I’m in my mid-30s doing an Improv class. I also like being a regular at my local Earls!

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Look out for new and exciting projects coming from my side of IndigiNews! I have a personal writing website you can check out and a contact form for freelance editing opportunities as well. Pre-order Pitiful from Iron Dog Books or your local indie bookseller! And if you haven’t yet, pick up The All + Flesh! You can also request books from your local library which is a great way to support authors for free! And, above all else, please listen to the really cool and tasteful playlist I have posted on my Inspiration page!

The post Introducing our new audience engagement editor, Brandi Bird appeared first on Indiginews.

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