Neal McLeod is Cree (having grown up on the James Smith reserve in Saskatchewan) and Swedish. Neal received the 2015 Gabrielle Roy prize for literary theory and criticism for Indigenous Poetics in Canada (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2014). His first book of poetry, Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow (Hagios Press, 2005), was nominated for multiple Saskatchewan Book Awards in 2005 and won Poetry Book of the Year – Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Awards in 2006. Neal currently lives in Kinistino, Saskatchewan, where he is at work on his next books.