Preeti’s Story

A woman standing outdoors near a body of water, with trees and grass around her, during sunset or golden hour.
Poster announcing Upstart & Crow's 2025 Poet in Residence Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal with a woman sitting on a couch with dark hair wearing colorful earrings.
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal with long hair squatting on a road with dappled shadows from leaves above, in an outdoor setting at night or in low light, captured in black and white.
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal with long dark hair and earrings sitting on a gray couch, posing with her head resting on her hand, wearing a black top and dark lipstick.
BIPOC artist standing at a podium with a sign reading 'Toronto International Festival of Authors'. She is smiling and wearing glasses and a denim jacket.
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal sitting on rocky ground during sunset, gazing into the distance with a peaceful expression.
South Asian writer and artist facilitating arts workshop
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal with black hair in a braid, wearing glasses and a gray blazer, looking at the camera against a plain background.
A black and white photo of a Preeti Dhaliwal with long, curly hair standing outdoors next to a tree, with a blurred background of trees and a winding path.
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal in a saree blindfolded, holding a balance scale in her right hand and a wooden stick in her left hand.

Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, BA, BCL, LLB, LLM, MFA (she/her) is a writer, facilitator, former lawyer and critical race feminist who grew up in an immigrant household on the traditional, present, and future territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen and Musqueam First Nations (Surrey and North Delta, BC). She has spent over two decades using arts-based methodologies to explore justice, healing, community-building and transformation, offering creative workshops across communities and institutions on Turtle Island. Preeti firmly believes stories change the world by altering our ways of seeing, feeling and being with one another and the planet. Her work asks how language so often used to colonize, flatten and desensitize might instead bring us back to ourselves, oneness and each other.


Before pursuing writing full-time, Preeti completed her BA at the University of British Columbia followed by her JD and BCL at McGill University, after which she articled at a boutique litigation firm and clerked at the Federal Court of Canada. She later completed a Master of Laws at the University of Victoria, using theatre and performance art to explore how law lives in the body with a focus on race and the Komagata Maru. She has received over two dozen awards for community service and academic excellence, including the DF Forster Award.

Though she’s been writing since she was five and immersed in the arts and poetry throughout her life, Preeti didn’t give herself permission to fully step into the identity of a writer until her thirties when she entered the University of Guelph’s MFA program as a nonfiction writer. While earning her MFA, she taught social justice and creative writing at the college level. Although she graduated from her MFA with a hybrid fictional novel, she turned to poetry as her primary mode of expression soon after—when no other language could speak to or contain what she was carrying. Since then, she has written hundreds of poems, studied with beloved mentors, and deepened her practice by engaging with hybridity, magical realism, polyphony, and experimentation with form. 

Preeti’s debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Brick Books (2027). Her writing explores grief, touch, sexuality, liberation, prayer, power, and diasporic Punjabi life. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Poetry Pause, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Humber Literary Review, Looseleaf, Grain, Arc Poetry, and ti-TCR, amongst numerous other publications. She is beyond grateful to have been selected as the 2025 poet in residence at Upstart & Crow. She is also grateful to have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and BC Arts Council, and to be an alumna of Banff Centre, Deer Lake and Voices of Our Nation (VONA).

2027. Brick Books. Preeti’s debut poetry collection.
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Aray YAAR Collective

Liberatory futures through sound, story and embodied expression

Founded in 2020, the Aray YAAR Collective—Ruby Singh, Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, and Hari Alluri—is a group of diasporic artists working at the intersections of poetry, music, performance, justice and storytelling. We believe art invites us to grieve, remember, reimagine and repair. 

We are  committed to crafting liberatory futures through sound, story and embodied expression. Rooted in poetry, music and memory, our practices span disciplines and continents, weaving the personal and the political, the ancestral and the emergent. Together, we explore art as ceremony, as resistance and as a tool for reimagining how we live with ourselves, each other and the planet. Our work honours multiplicity of voice, form and lineage, centring BIPOC experiences, radical imagination and community-based creation. 

Through performance, facilitation, collaboration and mentorship, we seek to spark connection and transformation by creating spaces of collective witnessing, grief, joy and possibility. Aray YAAR's work has been featured at the Indian Summer Festival, Spring Equinox Summit, in the anthology We Were Not Alone, and more. 

In Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi, Aray YAAR is a phrase that pulses with intimacy. It means “Oh friend,” but it holds more than translation can carry. It’s the sigh between laughter and grief. The shoulder bump between stories. The nudge that says, “I see you. I know you. Let’s go.” We chose Aray YAAR as the name for our collective to honour the spirit of chosen kinship, diasporic connection and creative camaraderie we’ve developed over the coures of 20+ years. It’s how we call each other into the work and into the world—with affection, irreverence and the deep understanding that art, like friendship, is where we begin again and again.