Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian lawyer, anti-racist educator, mother, singer and writer from Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Metis nation (Winnipeg.) Although she has been writing since the age of three, she only began submitting her work in the fall of 2019.
Since then, she has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize, shortlisted twice for the Writers Union of Canada Short Prose competition – with three stories on the list – the Fiddlehead Mag Short Story competition, the Missouri Review Perkoff Prize, the Masters Review Anthology X, the Freefall Magazine Short Prose contest, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and was included in the 2023 Journey Prize Anthology.
Zilla has won Honourable Mention in the Room Magazine Short Fiction contest, and first place in the GritLit Short Story contest, Malahat Review Open Season contest, and Prism Magazine Jacob Zilber Short Fiction prize. Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Fire, the Malahat Review, Prism, Room and the Puritan Review.
She writes about identity, belonging, mothering and the mother-daughter relationship, race relations, inclusion/exclusion, and the long shadow of history and the weight of inherited trauma. Zilla came into her own as a writer during a trifecta of pandemics: Covid-19, anti-Black racism and climate change, and so she feels an urgency to tell the stories that have always been in her heart but have not always been heard.
Zilla is now represented by Léonicka Valcius.