Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Métis nation, Winnipeg. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry for her first book, North End Love Songs, and her debut novel, The Break, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Vermette's other projects include The Seven Teachings Stories, a picture book series inspired by the Seven Sacred Teachings of the Anishinaabe, and this river, a short National Film Board of Canada documentary that chronicles the search for missing and murdered Indigenous women in the Winnipeg area. The Break was defended by Candy Palmater on Canada Reads 2017.

A companion to The Break, Vermette's 2021 novel The Strangers, a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds, won the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.