Biography
Cassandra Myers (they/she)he/ is an award winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, counselor, and youth worker from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra's work is cinematic and juicy with it's critical anti-oppressive eye.
After seven years in the slam poetry community, Cassandra's spoken word has won national competitions such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and the Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam. They have performed at major events such as Hillside Music Festival, and venues such as the Art Gallery of Ontario. Cassandra’s poetry has received over 50k views online on platforms such as Button Poetry and Slamfind. Their work has earned them notice as the Soulpepper Theater Queer Emerging Artist Award.
Simultaneously, Cassandra has a Master’s in Social Work and a Bachelors in Child and Youth Care which they apply to trauma informed arts education. Cassandra’s masters work on trauma-informed approaches to non-carceral justice for disabled, QTBIPOC surivors has been awarded the Nathanson Fellowship with Osegoode Law School, and the Hillary M. Weston Award in mental health research. They have organized major youth poetry events such as Louder Than A Bomb Toronto, and facilitated poetry programming for all ages with Lakeshore Arts, Workman Arts, Unity Charity and others. For their community work as an arts educator, Cassandra has won the LGTBQ Youthline Award for Outstanding Achievements in Arts.
Cassandra's published work has won the ARC Poem of the Year Award 2021 and twice won the Reader's Choice Award. Their nomination by ARC won this year's National Magazine GOLD Award in Poetry. In 2021, he was shortlisted for the RBC Penn Canada Award and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. A fellow of the Doris McCarthy and the Joy Kogawa Artist in Residence programs, Cassandra’s work can be found in the Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, Canthius, The Literary Magazine of Canada, and elsewhere. In addition to receiving multiple grants from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Arts Council, Cassandra is currently working on their first poetry debut.
Trained by modern arts dancer Yuji Oka, waacking legend Diana Reyes, the Footnotes Dance Crew, the BGirl Movement, and the Toronto Kiki Ballroom Community, their somatic dance and spoken word work has been featured in Trinity Square Video’s Ecologies Residency, and in the Brick Books Brickyard.
Their work is the kind that tugs concepts into frays, revealing truths and tying new solar systems in their wake.
Micro-interview
Yes I did read poetry in highschool! The poem that I loved in highschool was "Chops" from Perks of Being a Wallflower.
I first started writing poetry in grade 12 for a writers craft class where I did my first spoken word poem and then once i came to university in Toronto I found a spoken word community that welcomed me and emboldened me to keep writing. It was there that I became involved in the youth poetry community internationally attending festivals such as Brave New Voices, Youth Can Slam, and the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational.
In the words of Mary Oliver "to belong deeply to themselves" and once you belong deeply to yourself that's the kind of work that changes the world.
I wrote it on a boat at the lake just feeling so much joy. Being with my cousin and everything in the poem is a live depiction of the event that I was experiencing in that moment. Just noticing the way that we as brown mixed kids often feel like we don't have a community to belong to -- we are inbetween worlds. In this bay on the lake we belonged to each other. The only way my masculinity and my browness and my ability needed to be validated was by water, the sky, the trees, and my own blood. And that was a haven from all the voices elsewhere in the world telling me I'm not enough.
I would memorize "aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?"