Irene Marques is a bilingual writer (writing in English and Portuguese) and Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University in the English Department where she teaches literature, literary theory, and creative writing. She has also taught at the University of Toronto, York University and OCAD University in various departments including, the Department of English, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the African Studies Program—and worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health for 14 years. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, Masters in French Literature and Comparative Literature, a BA (Hon.) in French Language and Literature (University of Toronto) and a Bachelor of Social Work (Ryerson University). Marques’ academic writing intersects with her creative writing as both tend to explore issues of personal and collective identity, mystical and mythical understandings of self, world and universe, gender, race, empire, class, cultural syncretism, the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa and the Portuguese fascist regime. Her academic and creative endeavors are epistemological and ontological inquiries that display the individual as an entity constantly yearning to be “whole” in a markedly socio-political world that divides, dissects, annihilates, humiliates, and dismisses multidimensional (non-rational) intelligences and their enlightened ways. Her narratives are multifaceted, transcultural, transhistorical and transtemporal, and rely heavily on allegory, metaphor, lyricism, and magic-realism. Her writing is marked by a universal ethos that crosses geographical and cultural boundaries, bringing to the page existential themes that affect us all, while being characterized by a profound philosophical inquiry that sees the individual as an entity constantly yearning to be “whole” in a markedly socio-political world that divides, dissects, fragments, annihilates, humiliates, and dismisses multidimensional (non-rational) intelligences and their enlightened ways. She has published eights books in various genres (novel, short fiction, poetry and academic) and numerous articles, poems and short narrative in international scholarly journals, collectives and magazines.