Lauren McKeon was the editor of Canada’s progressive, independent This Magazine from November 2011-October 2016. Always fierce and feisty, This is like the Mother Jones of the North and has been named one of the most influential Canadian magazines of all time—publishing the country’s best and brightest thinkers in its 50-year history, including Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, and more. While at This, Lauren helmed one of the bestselling issues in recent years “Why Canada Need More Feminism,” and also organized the corresponding sold-out event, which headlined a diverse, intersectional roster of speakers. Before leading This, Lauren worked as a reporter, editor and writer in the North for several years, living in Yellowknife, and traveling Canada’s territories and northern Alberta. While there, she wrote about award-winning work about everything from prisons to pipelines.

Today, she is a contributing editor at Toronto Life magazine, Canada’s largest circulation city magazine, where she recently wrote about her experiences with sexual assault in the memoir 15 Years of Silence. In response, Lauren has heard from dozens of women around the world who’ve shared their own experiences—some for the first time—and was prominently featured in the documentary PTSD: Beyond Trauma, which aired in January 2017 on David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things. Her personal essays, which tackle the world and her experiences through a not-so-rosy feminist lens, have twice been featured on Longreads.com, a popular site dedicated to “helping people find and share the best storytelling in the world.” Her longform work has won her several Canadian National Magazine Awards, including three honorable mentions, one silver and, in 2015, a gold in the personal journalism category for her Toronto Life piece “Save me From My Workout.” She teaches longform writing at Humber College and has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Non-Fiction.