Billy-Ray Belcourt
Canadian poet, scholar, and writer
Billy-Ray Belcourt (born November 21, 1994) is a poet, scholar, and author from the Driftpile Cree Nation.
Belcourt's works cover a variety of topics and themes, including decolonial love, grief, intimacy, queer sexuality, and the role of Indigenous women in social resistance movements. Belcourt is the author of the poetry collection This Wound Is a World, which was chosen as one of CBC's best poetry books of 2017 and won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. Belcourt was the 2016 recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and is an associate professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
Life
Belcourt grew up in the community of Driftpile, Alberta. He was raised by his grandparents and began writing poetry around the age of 19.
As an undergraduate student, Belcourt studied comparative literature at the University of Alberta where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 2016. While at the University of Alberta, Belcourt was actively involved as "an advocate for LGBTQ and Indigenous communities", which included serving as the Aboriginal Student Council president. He was also a Youth Facilitator with the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN).
In 2015, Belcourt was selected as a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship to study at Wadham College, Oxford University, for the 2016–2017 school year.
The public source identifies “Billy-Ray Belcourt” as canadian poet, scholar, and writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Billy-Ray, Belcourt and Canadian.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q50825636. VIAF identifies the subject as 26150030625510960554. The Library of Congress control number is no2018014461. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 2017, 2018 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Billy-Ray Belcourt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.