 | This biography of a living person includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(April 2009) |
Wendy McGrath is a Canadian poet and novelist. She was the inaugural winner of the $50,000 Prairie Grindstone Prize (2023-2024).
Broke City (NeWest Press 2019) is the final novel in McGrath's Santa Rosa Trilogy. The second novel in the trilogy, North East (NeWest Press 2014) was nominated for the Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction. The Santa Rosa Trilogy is set primarily in Edmonton, Alberta circa 1960s. Santa Rosa, the first book in the series, was nominated for the 2012 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize.
McGrath collaborated with musician/producer Sascha Liebrand on the album "Before We Knew" (Entity Records 2019)--a spoken word collection set to Liebrand's music/arrangements. McGrath released the EP BOX (spring 2017) with the group Quarto & Sound—made up of Edmonton musicians Sascha Liebrand, Yana Loo, and writer McGrath. BOX is an adaptation of McGrath's eponymous "mirror poem"—a collaboration of poetry, jazz, spoken word, instrumental experimental music, and voice. Quarto & Sound is currently working on an arrangement and adaptation of McGrath's long poem inspired by the North Saskatchewan River.
McGrath's most recent poetry collection is A Revision of Forward (NeWest Press 2015). The book is the culmination of a decade-long poetry/print collaboration with printmaker Walter Jule, who also contributed cover art for McGrath's first book common place ecstasies (Beach Holme Publishing 2000). A Revision of Forward launched at Edmonton's SNAP Gallery in October, 2015. Natalie Olsen received an Honourable Mention Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design for her design work on the book, which incorporated image fragments from Jule's prints.
Recurring Fictions (University of Alberta Press 2002), McGrath's first novel, is an experimental work chronicling the history of a Canadian family. The plot structure of this novel is non-linear, with shifts in narrative viewpoint and time. The first line of the novel, "Johnny Cash played the harmonica imitating the sound of trains" hints at one of the novel's recurring motifs. The often poetic style of this novel is multi-layered with spaces in the text and on pages providing literal and figurative openings for the reader to enter the world of the narrator(s). Short fragments of the text are also repeated at the bottom of some of the pages.
Her first book of poetry, common place ecstasies (Beach Holme Publishing, 2000), explores themes of home, and childhood. A long poem, "Preserving," which is included in this collection was also published in chapbook form by Rubicon Press (February 2011). "Preserving" uses found portions of text extracted from a home canning pamphlet as a springboard for poetic narrative that tells the multi-generational story of prairie women. As noted on the Rubicon Press website: "McGrath's grandmother gave her that brochure and it was a palimpsest of sorts, with notes on the recipes and unexpected doodles penciled in. Publications like that brochure, as well as cookbooks, seemed to be in the background of her grandmothers' and her mother's lives when she was growing up. But, when she encountered these texts as an adult, their meaning became quite different."
McGrath's fiction and poetry has been broadcast on CBC Radio and has appeared in numerous literary journals. Her non-fiction has been published locally and nationally.
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Di Brandt often stylized as di brandt, is a Canadian poet and scholar from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She became Winnipeg's first Poet Laureate in 2018.
Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.
George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Leona Gom is a Canadian poet and novelist. Born on an isolated farm in northern Alberta, she received her B.Ed. and M.A. from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She has published six books of poetry and eight novels and has won both the Canadian Authors Association Award for her poetry collection Land of the Peace in 1980 and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her novel Housebroken in 1986.
Michael Crummey is a Canadian poet and a writer of historical fiction. His writing often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Cirilo F. Bautista was a Filipino poet, critic and writer of nonfiction. A National Artist of the Philippines award was conferred on him in 1998.
Anne Simpson is a Canadian poet, novelist, artist and essayist. She was a recipient of the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
Judith Moffett is an American author and academic. She has published poetry, non-fiction, science fiction, and translations of Swedish literature. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and presented a paper on the translation of poetry at a 1998 Nobel Symposium.
Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way, a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Enid Shomer is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five poetry collections, two short story collections and a novel. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New Times Book Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. Two of her books, Stars at Noon and Imaginary Men, were the subjects of feature interviews on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Her writing is often set in or influenced by life in the State of Florida. Shomer was Poetry Series Editor for the University of Arkansas Press from 2002 to 2015, and has taught at many universities, including the University of Arkansas, Florida State University, and the Ohio State University, where she was the Thurber House Writer-in-Residence.
David Dephy, also known as David Dephy Gogibedashvili, is a Georgian / American poet, novelist, essayist, performer, multimedia artist, painter, the founder of Poetry Orchestra and the poetic order Samcaully. He is the author of eight novels and seventeen collections of verse and three poetry bilingual audio albums with orchestra and electronic bands. Named as Literature Luminary by Bowery Poetry, Stellar Poet by Voices of Poetry, Incomparable Poet by Statorec, Brilliant Grace by Headline Poetry & Press and Extremely Unique Poetic Voice by Cultural Daily. He lives and works in New York City, USA.
Beth Goobie is a Canadian poet and fiction writer.
Joseph Rosenblatt was a Canadian poet who lived in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia. He won Canada's Governor-General's Award and British Columbia's B.C. Book Prize for poetry. He was also an artist, whose "line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets' books of poetry."
Wilfred Watson was professor emeritus of English at Canada's University of Alberta for many years. He was also an experimental Canadian poet and dramatist, whose innovative plays had a considerable influence in the 1960s. The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says that "Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theater years before the rear guard had fully emerged."
Bill Direen is a musician and poet. He manages the music group Bilders and lives in Otago, New Zealand.
Emma Trelles is a Latina poet, writer, professor, and served as poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California from 2021-2023.
Michael Oliver Johnson is a New Zealand author and creative writing teacher. He has written thirteen novels, eleven books of poetry, several short stories featured in critically acclaimed anthologies, and three children's books. Johnson has been awarded two literary fellowships in New Zealand, one with the University of Canterbury, and one with the University of Auckland. His novel Dumb Show won the Buckland Memorial Literary Award for fiction in 1997. He is also a founder of Lasavia Publishing Ltd, a publishing house created in Waiheke Island, New Zealand.
Paul Dawson is an Australian writer of poetry and fiction and a scholar in the fields of narrative theory and the study of creative writing. He is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in the School of the Arts and Media. He teaches creative Writing, literary theory, North American Literature, and British and Irish Literature.
Robin McGrath is a Canadian writer from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.
