Category: Author

Born and raised in the United States, Robin Blaser (1925-2009) was part of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and the San Francisco poetry communities of the 1960s. In 1966 he took up a position at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he taught for the next 20 years. He became a Canadian citizen in 1972. Blaser was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2005 and in 2008 received the Griffin Poetry Prize for his major work, The Holy Forest.

Sheila Watson (nee Doherty) (1939-1998) was a writer, teacher, and English professor best known for her novel The Double Hook (1959), which has been called the first modernist Canadian novel. Watson also published Deep Hollow Creek (1992), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. She wrote several collections of short stories and co-founded the literary magazine White Pelican.

Judith Copithorne (1939– ) was born and raised in Vancouver. Well known as a leading concrete poet and intermedia artist, Copithorne was a member of the “downtown poets” community in the 1960s and 70s, and was involved in such alternative art venues as Intermedia, Sound Gallery, and Motion Studio. She published in early issues of Ganglia and blewointment and has had work included in both gallery exhibitions and such print publications as New Direction in Canadian Poetry (1971), The Cosmic Chef (1970), Four Parts Sand (1972), THE LAST BLEWOINTMENT ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 1 (1985), The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry, 1998–2008 (2012), and Judith: An Anthology of Women Making Visual Poetry (2021). Most recently, Copithorne’s Another Order: Selected Works edited by Eric Schmaltz was published by Talonbooks.

Thea Bowering (1971–) was born in Vancouver. She now lives in Edmonton where she works as a writing instructor at Concordia University of Edmonton, sits on the board of NeWest Press, and is a member of The Olive Reading Series collective. In 2014, her story collection Love at Last Sight won the Alberta Book Publishing Award for Trade Fiction Book of the Year and was long-listed for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. Over the past few years, she’s turned from short fiction to creative non-fiction and longform bio-fiction that engages her family history.