Publisher pulls MMIW poetry book following criticism from victim’s family
A publisher has pulled a book of poems about missing and murdered Indigenous women from its collection following criticism that the author did not request the family’s permission to write about their loved one’s death in graphic detail.
Inuk writer and activist Delilah Saunders wrote in the Nova Scotia Advocate last month that she was “was disturbed and very upset” by the imagery in Shannon Webb-Campbell’s “Who Took My Sister?”
One poem in the collection describes the 2014 Halifax murder of Saunders’ sister Loretta Saunders, who was writing a thesis on missing and murdered Indigenous women at the time of her death.
Saunders wrote that Webb-Campbell did not reach out to the family for permission to write about Loretta’s death.