About the Author
Kyla Belvedere is a listener of stories, a collector of words, and a weaver of imagined lives. As a child, Kyla grew up in the wings of sold-out rock shows every second weekend. Her father, before succumbing to his own illnesses in the mid-1990s, worked in the music industry, a theme reflected throughout Kyla’s writing. This contrasted the suburban upbringing her mother planned for, which she received Mon-Fri. Common throughout the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Kyla was an unsupervised latchkey kid until her grandmother’s business flourished and her mother and stepfather worked from home. This success allowed Kyla to pursue a post-secondary education in literature, a first in her family.
Since childhood when bedridden with health complications, Kyla has escaped through stories, reading and writing with hunger. While pursuing her Bachelor of Arts, Kyla excelled in creative writing at Camosun College, but she focused on English literature and education when she transferred to the University of Victoria. A life-long learner, Kyla returned there to study English language learners. In 2022, Kyla will graduate from the University of Alberta with a Masters of Librarianship and Information Studies.
Currently, Kyla is the department chair for English teachers at a large high school. Her favourite classes to teach are English Studies 9 and 12, Creative Writing, and Literacy Studies. Continuous learning is part of life, and she hopes her attendance at writing conferences like Growing Room has shown her students this. She encourages young authors to follow their passions as she herself has.
Kyla lives in the unique city of Victoria, on the tip of Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada. Imagine a vast, dense rainforest being edged northward by cities. Within kilometres, this setting turns from tight urban neighbourhoods to wide distances of forests and views of the Olympic Mountains. Kyla enjoys the variety of seascapes and forests with her husband and two children, who all love the sea, plants, and animals. They enjoy a simple, busy life.
Kyla’s biggest literary fear is people assuming her characters are real, or worse, are her. Although she borrows heavily from her family history, This Simple Box of Masks and Scars is a work of fiction, the weaving of a forest of stories. This story tells an unconventional history of a messy yet conventional five-generation family as these average white women confront their trauma, neurodivergence, oppression, and power.
Kyla has completed the first draft of a Riverdale-meets-Becky-Albertali young adult novel based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She is currently drafting her third novel, Sunday’s Child, a thriller that tackles post-partum depression, infidelity, and gaslighting.
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