Ivan is good old-fashioned kitchen table stories. Imagine you are drinking black tea with canned milk, and it is snowing outside. The kitchen smells like homemade soup, and you don't have to work tomorrow so you can sit up all night talking and smoking cigarettes. Or maybe it is a warm night in the middle of July, and you are sitting on a wool blanket in the sand, resting your back against a big-beached log. The lake is smooth as glass and there is plenty of wood for the campfire. Someone is talking, telling you a story…

Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An amazing and prolific performer as well as teacher, Ivan was 2011’s Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg as well as an award-winning author of six collections of short stories, one novel, three CD’s, four short films and a renowned performer, Ivan’s first love is live storytelling, and over the last seventeen years she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam.

Ivan’s column, Loose End has appeared monthly in Xtra West magazine since 2001. Her first novel, Bow Grip, was released in the fall of 2006, and was awarded the ReLit award for best fiction and named by the American Library Association as a Stonewall honour book in literature. Her fifth collection of stories, The Slow Fix, was released in 2008, and was nominated for a Lambda award. In her newest collection of short stories; Missed Her, Ivan takes readers on an intimate journey: from her year spent in eastern Canada, to her return to the west coast, and the travels in-between.

In 2009 Ivan E. Coyote was named Vancouver Public Library’s newest Writer-in-Residence. Among her activities she was given writers one-on-one advice, leading memoir-writing sessions for seniors, and participated in the VPL's Book Camp, where she advised and inspire teenaged-writers. All for which Ivan was awarded the 2010 Pandora’s Collective Mentor Award.

Ivan is an accomplished solo performer, but also performs with musical collaborators, such as her band ‘One Trick Rodeo’ with guitarist Jon Wood and has toured multi-media projects that blend storytelling with live music, soundscape and visuals.

“Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture.”
- Ottawa X Press

“Ivan has a distinctive and persuasive voice, a flawless sense of pacing, and an impeccable sense of story.”
- Quill’s Magazine