Aja Couchois Duncan is a leadership coach and movement capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coast Miwok people. She is the author of Vestigial and Restless Continent, which won the California Book Award for Poetry. Her other projects include the collaborative opera Sweet Land, which was named the best opera of 2020 by the Music Critics Association of North America.