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Please join HighWater Press in celebrating the launch of Hopeless in Hope.

Presented by UBC's Edith Lando Virtual Learning Centre in partnership with the Faculty of Education Alumni Engagement Office 

About the event
All are welcome to the virtual celebration of the release of Hopeless in Hope! Hear from the book’s author, Wanda John-Kehewin.

This free event will be streamed live.

Date: October 23, 2023
Time: 4-5:15 pm (PT)
Format: virtual
Register by: October 19, 2023

REGISTER HERE

About the book
Fourteen-year-old Eva’s life is like her shoes: rapidly falling apart.

For Eva Brown, life feels lonely and small. Her mother, Shirley, drinks and yells all the time. She’s the target of the popular mean girl, and her only friend doesn’t want to talk to her anymore. All of it would be unbearable if it weren’t for her cat, Toofie, her beloved nohkum, and her writing, which no one will ever see.

Heartbreaking and humorous, Hopeless in Hope is a compelling story of family and forgiveness.

About the author
Wanda John-Kehewin (she, her, hers) is a Cree writer who uses her work to understand and respond to the near destruction of First Nations cultures, languages, and traditions. When she first arrived in Vancouver on a Greyhound bus, she was a nineteen-year-old carrying her first child, a bag of chips, a bottle of pop, thirty dollars, and a bit of hope. After many years of travelling (well, mostly stumbling) along her healing journey, she shares her personal life experiences with others to shed light on the effects of trauma and how to break free from the "monkeys in the brain."

Now a published poet, fiction author, and film scriptwriter, she writes to stand in her truth and to share that truth openly. She is the author of the Dreams series of graphic novels. Hopeless in Hope is her first novel for young adults.

Wanda is the mother of five children, two dogs, two cats, three tiger barbs (fish), and grandmother to one super-cute granddog. She calls Coquitlam home until the summertime, when she treks to the Alberta prairies to visit family and learn more about herself and Cree culture, as well as to continuously think and write about what it means to be Indigenous in today's times. How do we heal from a place of forgiveness?