Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
George Swede, is a Latvian Canadian psychologist, poet and children's writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He is a major figure in English-language haiku, known for his wry, poignant observations.
Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian poet and novelist. Her best-known work is the novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), an extended prose poem inspired by her romance with the poet George Barker.
Sheree Fitch is a Canadian author and literacy advocate. Known primarily for her children's books, she has also published poetry and fiction for adults.
Robert Hilles is a Canadian poet and novelist.
Susan McMaster is a Canadian poet, literary editor, performance poet, and former president of the League of Canadian Poets (2011–12).
Patricia Kathleen Page, was best known as a Canadian poet, though the citation as she was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada reads "poet, novelist, script writer, playwright, essayist, journalist, librettist, teacher and artist." She was the author of more than thirty published books that include poetry, fiction, travel diaries, essays, children's books, and an autobiography.
Betsy Struthers is a Canadian poet and novelist who lives in Peterborough, Ontario. She was co-editor and contributor to Poets in the Classroom, an anthology of essays about teaching poetry workshops written by members of the League of Canadian Poets. She was president of the League from 1995 to 1997 and has served as chair of its Education Committee and Feminist Caucus. She works as a freelance editor of academic non-fiction texts. Her book Still won the 2004 Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020 she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Alden Albert Nowlan was a Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright.
Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen was a Canadian poet and novelist. A "sophisticated, wide-ranging and thoughtful writer," she published more than 20 books in her life. "A sense of magic and mystery from her own interests in the Gnostics, Ancient Egypt and magic itself, and from her wonderment at life and death, makes her writing unique.... She's still regarded by most as one of the best Canadian poets."
Alfred Wellington Purdy was a 20th-century Canadian free verse poet. Purdy's writing career spanned fifty-six years. His works include thirty-nine books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence, in addition to his posthumous works. He has been called the nation's "unofficial poet laureate" and "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin.
David Donnell is a Canadian poet and writer. Born in St. Marys, Ontario, Donnell moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1958 before publishing his first book. Poems (1961), During this period Donnell frequented the Bohemian Embassy, where Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Milton Acorn, and other poets established their reputations. In conjunction with John Robert Colombo, Donnell printed Atwood's first book Double Persephone (1961) Donnell Published The Blue Sky poems 1974-77 examining the relationships of his life from an oblique perspective, then Dangerous Crossings (1980) followed by A Poem About Poland. Donnell won the Canadian Comic Poet Award in 1981, and the 1983 Governor General's Award for English language poetry for his collection Settlements. Donnell continued publishing with Water Street days (1989) where he examines his past and his childhood; the poems are narrative confessions; and China blues (1992). Donnell's poetry offers perspectives about city life and the stresses and ironic staples of urban life. Donnell's poetry is known for its escalating fascination with prose fiction that becomes more dominant in the final sections of China Blues and Water Street Days, and becoming an important feature in his publishing of Dancing In The Dark (1996).
Richard Daley Outram was a Canadian poet. Often regarded as a poet's poet, he wrote eleven commercially published books of poetry in addition to the many collections of poetry and prose published under the imprint of the Gauntlet Press. In 1999 he won the City of Toronto Book Award for his sequence of poems Benedict Abroad.
Amanda Means is an American artist and photographer. She currently lives and works in Beacon, NY.
Carolyn Mary Kleefeld is an English-born American author, poet, and visual artist. She is the author of twenty-five books, has a line of fine art cards, and has had numerous gallery and museum awards and exhibitions between 1981 and the present, in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major cities.
Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), Dictionary Poems, the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, Self Storage (Ballantine) and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt). She has two books forthcoming in 2017, a collection of poetry, The Selfless Bliss of the Body, and a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis
Rosalie Favell is a Métis (Cree/British) artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba currently based in Ottawa, Ontario, working with photography and digital collage techniques. Favell creates self-portraits, sometimes featuring her own image and other times featuring imagery that represents her, often making use of archival photos of family members and images from pop culture.
Deanna Young is a Canadian poet.
