Photo by Fabian Rivera
Kanika Lawton is a writer, poet, editor, creative director, and film scholar living in Toronto, Ontario by way of Vancouver, British Columbia. A second-generation Canadian of Cambodian-Chinese and Scottish-Swedish descent, Kanika is the Founder, Editor-In-Chief, and Creative Director of L'Éphémère Review, a bi-monthly online literary and art journal, and the Social Media Manager of Rambutan Literary, a literary and art journal dedicated to showcasing work from Southeast Asian writers and artists. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Hypertrophic Literary, Longleaf Review, and Crab Fat Magazine, among others, and profiled in The Ellis Review, Horn & Ivory Zine, and God Is In The TV Zine. She is the author of the micro-chapbooks Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018) and Loneliness, and Other Ways to Split a Body (Ghost City Press, 2018), and is a 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold and Silver Key recipient, 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist, 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee, and 2018 Pink Door Fellow.
Kanika holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she served as an editor with the UBC Undergraduate Film Student Association. She is an MA Candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, where she teaches on horror films and sex in cinema, and whose areas of interests include critical theory, cult cinema, apparatus theory, American ideology in Hollywood film, and feminist film theory. She presented her senior thesis on ideology, genre, and race in Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012) at the 39th annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico in February 2018, and some of her previous work have concentrated on teenage girlhood, weaponized femininity, and the collapse of the American Dream in Spring Breakers (dir. Harmony Korine, 2013).
Kanika holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she served as an editor with the UBC Undergraduate Film Student Association. She is an MA Candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, where she teaches on horror films and sex in cinema, and whose areas of interests include critical theory, cult cinema, apparatus theory, American ideology in Hollywood film, and feminist film theory. She presented her senior thesis on ideology, genre, and race in Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012) at the 39th annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico in February 2018, and some of her previous work have concentrated on teenage girlhood, weaponized femininity, and the collapse of the American Dream in Spring Breakers (dir. Harmony Korine, 2013).