Jessica Hiemstra is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy. In 2018, Hiemstra won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario/ Niigaani-gichigami. Some of these drawings appear in Blood Root.