Photo by Aloysius Wong

Kanika Lawton (she/her) is a Vancouver-born, Toronto-based writer, editor, and film scholar. She holds a Bachelor's of Arts in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Master's of Arts from the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute. She has presented her scholarly research on film and media studies at universities and 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 Founding Editor-In-Chief of L'Éphémère Review, a 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist, a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a 2018 Pink Door Fellow, and a 2020 BOAAT Writer's Retreat Poetry Fellow. In 2019, she was a guest editor for Glass: A Journal of Poetry's Poets Resist series and has served as an editor for UBC Undergraduate Film Student Association and The Neutral: The University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Journal. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, ​Longleaf Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others.

​​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), Monster (Girl) Theory (post ghost press, 2019), and Theories on Wreckage (Ghost City Press, 2020). Currently, she works as a freelance copyeditor and is on the Editorial Board of Sundress Publications as Assistant Staff Director.