Thomas Nowa Photgraphy
Rayya Liebich (she/her) is a Canadian writer and educator of Lebanese and Polish descent. She is the author of the award-winning chapbook Tell Me Everything (Beret Day Press) and full-length poetry collection Min Hayati (Inanna Publications). Passionate about writing as a tool for transformation and changing the discourse on grief, she is currently obsessed with nonlinear forms of CNF and completing a hybrid memoir on her simultaneous experience of motherhood/mother-loss. She finds joy in teaching creative writing in beautiful Nelson, BC.
Rayya Liebich (she/her) is an award-winning Canadian writer and educator of Lebanese and Polish descent. Passionate about writing as a tool for transformation and changing the discourse on grief, she teaches creative writing classes to youth, and adults in Nelson, British Columbia.
Liebich discovered the transformative potential of writing as a vehicle for healing following the death of her mother in 2014. Her collection Tell Me Everything, won the Golden Grassroots Chapbook Award, and was published by The Ontario Poetry Society in October, 2015. Her debut full-length poetry manuscript Min Hayati was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June, 2021.
A finalist in seven CNF contests in 2022, she was Longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize and is the winner of The International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir and The Federation of BC Writers Literary Contest (2022). She is also the winner of The Richard Carver Award for Emerging Writers ( 2019), The Geneva Literary Award (2015) and the Kootenay Literary Competition (2005). Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts (October, 2022), Atticus Review (August, 2022), Poetry Pause (League of Canadian Poets, July 2022), WordWorks Magazine (The Federation of BC’s Writers, October 2021), The Capilano Review (August 2017), R.K.V.R.Y Journal (July 2015), Offshoots Anthology (Geneva, Switzerland, 2015) and elsehwere. She is a graduate of McGill University (B.A English Literature) and The University of Victoria (B Ed.)
As of 2015, Liebich has committed to her own writing practice and to helping others write their life stories. She has taught Liminal Life Writing, Flash Writing, Memoir and Poetry at Oxygen Art Centre, a series called Writing Through the Grief at Kalein Hospice and led the Teen Creative Writing Club at the Nelson Public Library. She has worked as a writer in residence through ArtStarts BC in nine West Kootenay schools bringing her passion for poetry to the classrooms. She believes that children are natural poets and that the world needs more poetry.