Category: Author

U.S.American-born Warren Tallman (1921-1994) moved to Vancouver in the 1950s to take up a position as a professor at University of British Columbia where he remained until his retirement in 1987. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he mentored several Canadian poets who made up the TISH movement and the Downtown poets group. Tallman was a prolific recordist who made audio recordings of many West Coast poetry readings and other events. Tallman is also author of the volumes Godawful Streets of Man (Coach House, 1978) and In the Midst (Talon, 1992). With Donald Allen, he edited The Poetics of the New American Poetry (Grove, 1973).

Maxine Gadd was born in England in 1940 and moved to the West Coast of Canada when she was a child. After attending Kitsilano High School, she received her B.A. from the University of British Columbia. Gadd is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Guns of the West (blewointment 1967), Lost Language (Coach House Books, 1982), Fire in the Cove, (M(O)ther Tongue, 2001), and Subway Under Byzantium (New Star, 2008), to name just a few.

Roy Miki is a Canadian poet, critic, activist, editor, and educator. Born in 1942 on a sugar beet farm in Manitoba, where his second-generation Japanese-Canadian parents were forcibly relocated and interned by the Canadian government during WWII, Miki was instrumental in the redress movement in the 1980s. He earned a B.A. from the University of Manitoba, an M.A. from Simon Fraser University, and a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. He moved to Vancouver in 1967 and taught at SFU for more than thirty years. He is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Surrender which won the 2001 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Miki is the author of A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering (1989), Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing(1998), Redress: Inside the Japanese-Canadian Call for Justice (2004), among many others. Miki was made a Member of the Order of Canada (2006) and received the Gandhi Peace Award for the truth, justice, and human rights work of his redress work. He was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2007) and a Member of the Order of British Columbia (2009).

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.