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).