Photo by Fabian Rivera
Kanika Lawton is a writer, poet, editor, and film scholar from Vancouver, British Columbia, now living in Toronto, Ontario. A 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold and Silver Key recipient, 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and 2018 Pink Door Fellow, Kanika is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of L'Éphémère Review and the Social Media Manager of Rambutan Literary. Her work have appeared or is forthcoming in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Hypertrophic Literary, Longleaf Review, Crab Fat Magazine, and Rust + Moth, among others, and have been profiled in The Ellis Review, Horn & Ivory Zine, and wildness. 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).
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 and Graduate Assistant at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, where she teaches on horror films and sex in cinema. Her areas of interests include genre, critical theory, cult cinema, apparatus theory, 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 currently volunteers with LGBTOUT, Canada's oldest LGBTQ+ student organization (based out of the University of Toronto), as well as the Cinema Studies Institute's graduate student film journal.
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 and Graduate Assistant at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, where she teaches on horror films and sex in cinema. Her areas of interests include genre, critical theory, cult cinema, apparatus theory, 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 currently volunteers with LGBTOUT, Canada's oldest LGBTQ+ student organization (based out of the University of Toronto), as well as the Cinema Studies Institute's graduate student film journal.
