Photo by Aloysius Wong

Kanika Lawton is a Vancouver-born, Toronto-based writer and editor. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Master's of Arts degree from the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, where her thesis "Bodies as Mirrors: Figuring Annihilation in the Female Double" interrogate issues of corporeality, subject formation, and gender in psychological horror films. She has presented her scholarly work at conferences across Canada and the United States, most notably at Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA)'s annual conference, the University of Toronto, Columbia University, Spiral: Film and Philosophy Conference, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. 

Kanika is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of L'Éphémère Review, edited the anthologies Beyond the Shallows and Overture to Memory (both through L'Éphémère Review) and guest-edited Glass Poetry's Poets Resist series in June 2019. A 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist, multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, 2018 Pink Door Fellow, and 2020 BOAAT Writer's Retreat Poetry Fellow, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, ​Hypertrophic Literary, Glass Poetry, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others, anthologized in Shared Horizons: A Rambutan Literary Anthology (ed. Do Nguyen Mai, Rambutan Literary, 2018), The Anatomy of Desire: An Anthology of Distance, (ed. Shekinah Vera-Cruz, The Poetry Annals, 2018), RECLAIM: An Anthology of Women's Poetry (ed. Elizabeth Ruth Deyro, 2019), and Trigger Warning: An Anthology on Mental Health (ed. Jean-Marie Bub, the sad bitch chronicles, 2019), and profiled in The Ellis Review and Horn & Ivory Zine.

​Kanika is the author of the micro-chapbooks Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018), Loneliness, and Other Ways to Split a Body (Ghost City Press, 2018), and Monster (Girl) Theory (post ghost press, 2019).