Balancing an ambivalent relationship to the past, and fear and hope for the future, Kasia Van Schaik's portraits of female interiority, immigrant identity, dislocation, and desire trace the transitions from girlhood to adulthood, grappling with the struggle to understand what it means to live on earth.

Kasia Van Schaik is a South African-Canadian writer, teacher, and literary critic living in Montreal/Tiohtià ke. She holds a PhD in Literature and teaches Creative Writing at McGill University.We Have Never Lived On Earth, a linked story collection that explores what it means to come of age in the era of environmental collapse, is her first book of fiction. It was shortlisted for the Concordia University First Book Prize and the ReLit prize.Kasia is the author of the poetry chapbook Sea Burial Laws According to Country. She received the Mona Adilman Prize for poetry related to ecological concerns, the Peterson Memorial Fiction Prize, the Quebec Federation's Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted and longlisted for the CBC short story and nonfiction prize. Kasia's writing has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, PRISM International and more.