Sanita Fejzić is a playwright, poet, and literary writer.
Sanita’s first poetry collection, Refugee Mouth, was published by Frontenac House in 2025, a month after her dramatic comedy, Blissful State of Surrender, was launched by Playwrights Canada Press. Sanita’s debut novella, Psychomachia, was shortlisted for the 2016 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest and the 2017 Canada ReLit Awards. Her children’s story, (M)other, was translated into French by Sylvie Nicolas as Mère(s) et monde. Sanita has published poetry and short stories in magazines across the country; she has won, and been nominated for, several awards including the CBC Poetry and CBC Nonfiction prizes, among others.
Blissful State of Surrender, premiered at the Great Canadian Theatre Company on February 22, 2022. It was nominated for five Rideau Awards; Dana Užarević won Best Actress. In 2023, Sanita produced Why Worry About Their Futures at the undercurrents festival, a tryptic of three short plays about eco-social justice including her 10 minute piece, “Expecting.”
Sanita articulated an artistic movement she calls Peasant Futurisms while completing her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. The child of Bosniak peasants, Sanita is into healing people, living soil, and the planet’s diverse ecosystems through peasant knowledges and their modern uptakes including organic and regenerative farming, agro-ecology, and permaculture gardening.
In Sanita’s work, Peasant Futurisms poses a challenge to capitalist cities that center cars and big commerce by imagining edible and wilder eco-cities surrounded by peasant food belts. Her radio play, Machines and Moss, produced by the National Arts Centre is part of the Peasant Futurist movement. Sanita has also developed an online course for the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Peasant Futurisms: Cultivating Delicious Futures, accessible for free.
A genderfluid lesbian*, Sanita lives with her wife and two children on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people in Ottawa, Canada. Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, she fled the Siege of Sarajevo and genocide of her Bosniak people at the age of seven, and lived as a refugee, illegal immigrant, and temporary guest across three countries before seeking permanent refuge in Canada. *Please note: for Sanita, as for French feminist Monique Witting, “a lesbian is not a woman.”
Fejzić is pronounced fey-zitch. If you can say Nietzsche, you can say Fejzić.