Canadian Women in the Literary Arts has announced Lucas Crawford as its 2015 critic-in-residence.

Crawford    currently Simon Fraser University’s Ruth Wynn Woodward gender, sexuality, and women’s studies lecturer    is a Vancouver-based writer and researcher. He will be taking the place of CWILA’s outgoing critic-in-residence, Shannon Webb-Campbell.

The position was created three years ago in response to the gender gap in Canadian literary and critical culture, and aims to promote literature by women and transgender writers.

Critic-in-residence jury chair and CWILA board member Libe Garcia Zarannz said in a press release that Crawford was a unanimous choice, and that his work will “progressively enable a shift in CWILA’s relationship to the transgender literary community.”

Crawford, from the press release:

“CWILA’s commitment to rethinking the highly gender-skewed character of Canada’s literary establishment drew me to apply for this position. I was struck by the fact that CWILA foregrounds the possible role of genderqueer and transgender people in the organization. As such a person engaged in my own poetry practice, this resonated with me. As critic-in-residence, I’ll not just seek ways to include trans literature, but will also ask tough questions of mainstream literary circles: Do the canons and new circles of Canadian literature sometimes implicitly rely upon harmful ideas about gender? How many trans authors have our leading presses and periodicals published, and why? What does Canadian literature stand to gain by taking seriously work that re-imagines gender, genres, and nation?”