Kristyn Dunnion is a Canadian writer who grew up in Essex County, the southern-most tip of Canada, and now lives in Toronto. She earned a B.A. from McGill University and an M.A. from the University of Guelph. She has published six fiction books, to date. Dunnion is a deft prose stylist who brings visceral street-punk and speculative worlds to the page with eloquence and heart. Her fiction appears in Best Canadian Stories 2020, Orca: A Literary Journal, Foglifter, Toronto 2033, and many other fine publications.
Kristyn also supports homeless or marginally housed adults with serious mental illness, and has been a healthy food advocate in Davenport-Perth, where she resides. An engaging public speaker, she facilitates innovative workshops for emerging and established artists, especially for diverse at-risk and queer youth. A queer punk performance artist, Dunnion played bass in Heavy Filth (2008-2011) and Bone Donor (2014-2017).
“No one writes like Kristyn Dunnion, not even those of us who really, really want to….Just how many lives has Dunnion lived exactly, to be able to write like this? Because you believe every word and walk beside every character.” —Cherie Dimaline, best-selling author of The Marrow Thieves and Empire of Wild on Stoop City
“Kristyn Dunnion is a sharply observant chronicler of the marginal urban experience. In these tightly written stories, nobody gets a break.” —Ian Colford, Miriamichi Reader on Stoop City
‘Dunnion is a master of reality gore’ – EDGE Palm Springs
‘Pushing the YA envelope about as far as it can go without being an actual mail bomb’ – Montreal Mirror, on Big Big Sky
‘This novel by Toronto’s Kristyn Dunnion is gritty, sexy and brutal’ – MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL, on The Dirt Chronicles
‘Dunnion cooks up a dozen sad, pretty, lonely stories and shoots them into whatever unused vein she can find on her audience’ – THIS Magazine, on The Dirt Chronicles
‘Dunnion assembles a memorable cast of dykes, she-males and wannabe rock stars’ – HERIZON, on MOSH PIT
‘The teen underworld Dunnion so convincingly creates may traumatize some adult readers, as S.E. Hinton did a generation ago’ – Quill and Quire, on MOSH PIT