Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa-based writer and editor from Kentucky, whose award-winning, multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens.
They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022, Winner of The Archibald Lampman Award and Finalist for the Pat Lowther, Raymond Souster, and ReLit Awards) and We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020, Winner of the Ottawa Book Award). They've also released the album Further Behind You and many other solo and collaborative chapbooks, musical releases, and sound-based works. Their seventh solo chapbook, Kneeling in Our Name, was released with Gap Riot Press in summer 2024. They are working on a novel.
Their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published widely throughout North America, including The Ex-Puritan, Room Magazine, THIS Magazine, filling station, Best Canadian Poetry 2023, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others.
In 2019, they won the Capilano Review's 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize, and in 2017, Arc Poetry Magazine's Diana Brebner Prize. Their collaborative chapbook with Manahil Bandukwala, Sprawl | the time it took us to forget (Collusion Books, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award.
They are currently a Senior Editor at Augur, and formerly guest edited special issues for CV2 and Room Magazine, and were the Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine. They are a member of the creative collection VII.
Conyer offers freelance editorial and consultation services—reach out if you'd like to work with them on your manuscript, a grant consultation, or otherwise.
