Conyer Clayton is a queer writer, editor and bookseller from Louisville, Kentucky, living in Ottawa. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award) and many chapbooks. Conyer's fiction has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and a McCormack Writing Center Scholarship. the lake-shaped excuse is their third book.