About Melora Koepke
Short synopsis
Award-winning and bilingual Vancouver- and Montreal-based cultural journalist, nonfiction magazine writer and editor, researcher, scholar, consultant and teacher.
Current Ph.D candidate in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University (2018).
M.A. from Concordia University’s Department of Communication Studies (2007).
Long synopsis
Melora is a Vancouver-raised and based independent journalist and writer. Her work has won National Magazine Awards, Banff fellowships and Canada Council grants, among other awards.
Her general-interest journalism focuses on social justice and feminist issues, food, travel, the environment, film, arts and culture, and has been published in The Walrus, enRoute, The Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, the Vancouver Sun, Maisonneuve, National Geographic, Saturday Night, and many others.
She was a former editor of Hour Magazine, Montreal’s alt-weekly, where she ran the film section from 2005-2011, and of Maisonneuve Magazine (2004-2007). She has also worked as a broadcast journalist with the CBC and a consultant at the National Film Board of Canada.
She holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for 2015-2019. Her doctoral research, in Simon Fraser University’s Geography department, examines sites of food provision and Safe Injection Sites for injection drug users in Canada and France, and highlights the potential benefit for neighbourhoods to incorporate these spaces.
She holds an M.A. in Media Studies from Concordia University’s Department of Communication Studies, where her thesis, Corpus Delicti: Disappearance and Bodily traces in Vancouver 1978-2007, contextualized her hometown of Vancouver’s Missing Women investigation within gender-based violence and urban exclusion through the lenses of media theory, trauma, psychoanalysis, and critical urban geography.
Melora’s writing has been widely published in most Canadian newspapers and general-interest magazines including The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Maclean’s, and enRoute, as well as in other national and international publications. Her work has won National Magazine Awards, as well as fellowships and grants from the Banff Centre and the Canada Council.
She is a former editor at Hour Magazine, Montreal’s alt-weekly, where she ran the film section from 2004-2011, and was the food critic. She has also worked as a broadcast journalist with the CBC and a consultant at the National Film Board of Canada, and has taught journalism and non-fiction narrative writing classes at Concordia University since 2008.
Melora has lived in Montreal and Vancouver, and has traveled on assignment to remote corners of every Canadian province from Fogo Island, Newfoundland to Haida Gwaii, B.C., in the U.S. and Mexico, and to international locations in Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Belize and Ecuador, France, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K., Iceland, peninsular Malaysia and Borneo, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the UAE, and Australia.
Melora is also co-creator of Dinner Against Death, an ongoing artistic research-creation project at Concordia University’s SenseLab, within their SSHERC Partnership Grant-funded Immediations project. She is also a founding member of Grrls’ Meat Camp, an international coalition of women butchers, charcutières and livestock producers, and is currently in the process of founding the Vancouver Meat Collective, a local, community-oriented whole-animal butchery mentorship organization.
Contact
melora@sympatico.ca
Melora Koepke’s CV: Click CV-May 2013 -Melora Koepke.