For some students, the path through life is clear; others take a more circuitous journey to arrive at their destination. Morgan, who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2008, definitely sees herself in the latter camp, but the publication of her latest collection—Building a Nest from the Bones of My People—finds her weaving the various strands of her life into a powerful book of poetry fusing both sides of her cultural history. Morgan has both Indigenous (Métis) and immigrant (Trinidadian) roots.

“I feel like poetry has to do with the human voice in all of us,” she says. “I realize now that I’ve been a poet my whole life, but I just never understood what poetry was until I took my first class [at UVic]—no one had ever told me it was about more than just making up little cute rhymes.”

Part of that love of the lyrical stemmed from the Writing department’s poetic giants of the day: Lorna Crozier and Tim Lilburn, plus acclaimed instructors Carla Funk and Steven Price. “It was Tim who identified early on that I had a unique Afro-Indigenous voice that hadn’t been heard in Canada before,” Morgan recalls. “My professors saw the value of my work and recognized that I had a fresh perspective; that made me realize there was a seat at the table for me as a poet. That faith really fuelled my desire to put my work out in the world.”

Currently based in Toronto, Morgan still works for the Canada Border Services Agency (now in Indigenous affairs)—a position she holds thanks in part to some advice from Lorna Crozier.

“I remember sitting in Lorna’s office and telling her that I wanted to be a poet,” Morgan recalls. “She said to me, ‘Are you independently wealthy? Because every artist needs a job that will allow them to create their work.’ She basically told me that the idea of the starving poet is a myth, which freed me up to realize that a good, steady government job can actually be inspiring and offer the space and time and money to create work in a way that’s really free.”

Clearly it was good advice, as Morgan’s first two poetry collections, What Became My Grieving Ceremony and Cartograph, were released in 2014 and 2017. Her latest, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People, was published in the fall of 2023 and explores the colonial injury of Black and Indigenous people from an intergenerational perspective.

She sees the history of Canadian colonization—both the transatlantic slave trade and First Nations enfranchisement and oppression—as two sides of a coin, which she explores in her new collection. “It was really about unifying those sides for me… I was able to stop feeling like I had a split personality and it was just part of the whole story.”