Alisha Piercy

Alisha Piercy is a Montréal-based author, artist and paintings conservator. Her practice ranges from bookworks to the writing of novellas, to in-situ performative drawing and raft installations. Her projects explore questions of alienation, psychological geographies, the fantasy of “being elsewhere,” and the tension between exile and freedom as it plays out in a diversity of islanded experiences. Her multi-disciplinary project You have hair like flags~(2010), a survivalist story, was inspired by the slogan Barcelona or Death! from a Senegalese pop song about the masses of young African men who attempt to float towards mainland Europe. The project included a novella, a thirty-day-long wall drawing performance in Montréal, and an installation of burning rafts set off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland. rnrnPiercy is a co-founder of Your Lips to Mine Press with Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay: a small, independent press. Her first book, two novellas AURICLE / ICEBREAKER (2010), were published as part of the reversible series by Conundrum Press. Her second work of fiction, You have hair like flags~ (Your Lips to Mine Press, 2010) won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for 2010. In 2011, Piercy published with The Coming Envelope (BookThug), participated in The Montréal Literary Death Match, and performed on the mainstage at The Scream Literary Festival.