Cassidy McFadzean was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. She studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and fiction at Brooklyn College, where she was co-Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Review.

Cassidy is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her poetry has appeared in magazines across Canada and the US, and has been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry, In Fine Form 2, and The New Wascana Anthology, and shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. Her crown of sonnets Third State of Being (Gaspereau 2022)was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, CALYX, The Conium Review, EVENT, The Malahat Review, and Maisonneuve. Her story “Victory Day” was runner-up for Prism International‘s 2019 Jacob Zilber Prize for Fiction, and subsequently selected for Best Canadian Stories 2020. She is at work on a novel and a collection of stories exploring how grief fractures reality.

mcfadzeancassidy [at] gmail