I’m a writer, editor, educator, and witch1 living in Moh’kins’tis (colon-ly known as Calgary). Er. Colonially. You know what I mean.

My first chapbook of poetry, this dying body, was released in July 2022 with Rahila’s Ghost Press, and I’m currently an MA student in English at the University of Calgary pursuing a creative thesis on trans ancestry and folklore.

My writing has been published in Plenitude MagazineThis Side of WestNonBinary Review, Briarpatch Magazine, and a few other places. I have a short story in Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color, and I wrote a chapter of Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture with Nora Samaran. I also edit with Room magazine, and have mentored trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit youth through the Gender Generations Project.

Artistic rendering of Serena Lukas Bhandar, a smiling woman with brown hair and olive skin, wearing a flowery scarf
  1. Yes, I’m a practicing witch! No, I do not eat children! Okbye.

my first chapbook, this dying body, was published by Rahila’s Ghost Press in 2022.

The poems in it examine the tensions between transcendence, substance (ab)use, and self-harm by remixing the themes and characters of the novel The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle and its 1982 animated adaptation with my own experiences. 

I initially wrote some of the chapbook in late 2020 as I began to understand how self-medicating cannabis and my ongoing struggles with chronic mental and physical illness were impacted by the social isolation and stress of the pandemic. The central narrative of the chapbook soon became an analysis of and homage to the transformation sequence in The Last Unicorn, when the titular mythical creature is forced to become a mortal woman and cries, “I can feel this body dying all around me.” 

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