Fred Wah

Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Fred Wah was raised in the interior of British Columbia and received his BA in English from UBC. He was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter Tish, the editor of Sum magazine (1963-65), and later co-editor with Frank Davey of SwiftCurrent (1984-1990). Wah is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems (1980), Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987), and Diamond Grill (1996). In 2018, he and poet-activist Rita Wong co-authored beholden: a poem as long as a river. Wah’s critical work includes the award-winning Faking it: Poetics & Hybridity (2000).

Fred Wah holding reel-to-reel mic, 3 May, 2022. Photo credit: Karis Shearer.

| Recordings

There are no ‘Recordings’ available for this author at this time.

| Remediations

Author, Exhibition

“World word alive”: Fred Wah at Malaspina

February 11, 2026

By Klara du Plessis On 3 February 1972 at 8pm, Fred Wah was recorded on ¼ inch magnetic tape reading at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, B.C. The event was sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and formed part of a two-month series that included other poets such as Stan Persky and Robert Kroetsch. The reel-to-reel is part of the Fred Wah fonds in the SoundBox Collection at the University…
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| Bibliography

Fred Wah Digital Archive: A Collection of Works Involving Canadian Poet Fred Wah. Ed. Deanna Fong. Available Online: https://fredwah.ca/

Wah, Fred. Scree: The Collected Earlier Works (1962-1991). Ed. Jeff Derksen. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2016.

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Where

The SoundBox collection is digitized, archived, and remediated on the traditional and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. The collection encompasses the thoughts and work of voices recorded across so-called British Columbia and so-called Canada, including on the traditional and unceded territories of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, Secwépemc, Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Located on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. The collection is housed at The University of British Columbia (Okanagan) and loved by The AMP Lab.

3333 University Way
Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7

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To learn more about how you can become involved within the SpokenWeb Project at UBCO, please email Karis Shearer at karis.shearer@ubc.ca.

SpokenWeb is a SSHRC-funded partnership grant.
All material that appears on this website is used for the purposes of academic research and critical study.

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This collection is made available for non-commercial research and educational purposes. Numerous rights holders are represented in this collection. The SpokenWeb Project at UBCO wishes to hear from any copyright owner, creator, contributor or their representatives, who believe that this project has not properly attributed their work or has used it without authorization. Please contact karis.shearer@ubc.ca and include the URL of the work in your message.

| Recordings

| Remediations

“World word alive”: Fred Wah at Malaspina

| Bibliography

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