AUTHORS AND
ARTISTS AT THE PACIFIC FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK 2010
Some of the writers and artists at this years' Festival. More
to come!
Bert Almon
Bert Almon was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1943 during a hurricane. He completed
a B.A. at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1965 and a Ph.D. at the University
of New Mexico in 1971 having written the first dissertation on the Beat poet,
Gary Snyder. He came to Canada to teach at the University of Alberta in 1968
and has become a Canadian citizen. He began writing poetry in 1967. He teaches
creative writing, modern literature and autobiography. More than thirty of
his poetry students have gone on to publish books. He won the Writers' Guild
of Alberta Award for poetry in 1998 for Earth Prime (Brick Books).
George Bowering
George Bowering is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer.
He was born in Penticton, British Columbia, and raised in the nearby town
of Oliver, where his father was a high-school chemistry teacher. Bowering
is author of more than 90 books. Bowering lives in Vancouver, British Columbia
and is Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, where he worked for
30 years. In 2002, Bowering was appointed the first ever Canadian Parliamentary
Poet Laureate. That same year, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
He was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2004. He played various infield
positions for the York Street Tigers (Montreal), the Granville Grange Zephyrs,
the Zunks, and finally for the Paperbacks (Vancouver), from which he retired
only a few years ago
Kristi Bridgeman
Kristi Bridgeman is both an exhibiting visual artist and an illustrator of
books for children, including the popular picture books The Sock Fairy,
The Knot Fairy and the recent book with P.K Page There Once Was
a Camel. Born and raised on the West Coast of Canada, she attended Emily
Carr College of Art and now resides in Victoria, British Columbia. Actively
involved with the environment, children and the arts, she is vice president
of the Island Illustrator’s Society. Samples of Kristi Bridgeman’s
work can be found at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Sooke Harbour
House Gallery as well as the website: www.kristibridgeman.com.
Trevor Carolan
Born in Yorkshire, Trevor Carolan emigrated as a boy to British Columbia and
was raised in the family building trade in New Westminster. He began writing
for the city newspaper at age 17. After travelling Europe and India for three
years he completed a M.A. in English at Humboldt State in California. He later
worked in Alberta with the 15th Olympic Winter Games. He has published 13
books of poetry, fiction, translation, memoir, and anthologies. Active in
Pacific Coast watershed issues, aboriginal land claims, and Asia-Pacific human
rights campaigns, he served three years as elected municipal councillor for
North Vancouver, then as a political columnist. He earned an interdisciplinary
PhD from Bond University in Queensland, Australia in 2007, and now teaches
English at University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C. beneath Kul-Shan,
Mount Baker.
Jim Christy
Jim Christy is a writer, artist and tireless traveller. The author of twenty
books, including poetry, short stories, novels, travel and biography, his
travels have taken him from the Yukon to the Amazon, Greenland to Cambodia.
He has covered wars and exhibited his art internationally. Raised in inner-city
Philadelphia, he moved to Toronto when he was twenty-three years old and became
a Canadian citizen at the first opportunity. His most recent novel is Nine
O’Clock Gun (2008), part of the Gene Castle, Private Eye series
set in Vancouver. A resident of British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast for
many years, he currently resides in Toronto.
Olga Costopoulos
Poet Olga Costopoulos teaches Creative Writing at the University of Alberta.
Her first book, Muskox and Goat Songs was published by Ekstasis Editions
in 1995. Since that time she has been honing her craft and publishing in magazines,
notably the Australian Arts magazine Quadrant. Olga Costopoulos writes,
cooks and gardens at her home in Edmonton, Alberta. Her most recent book is
The Tiger Side of Night.
Brad Cran
Brad Cran is a poet, essayist and photographer. He has twice curated the widely
successful Poetry Bash at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers
Festival. His collection of poetry, The Good Life (Nightwood Editions),
was hailed by the Vancouver Sun in 2002 as the one book of poetry
people should read that year. In 2004, Cran received the Writing and Publishing
commission at the Vancouver Arts Awards, and, in 2009, Cran and his wife Gillian
Jerome were nominated for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the B.C.
Book Prizes for their book Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press), which also won the
2009 City of Vancouver Book Award and raised over $30,000 for the people of
the Downtown Eastside. He is the current poet laureate of Vancouver.
Mike Doyle
Mike Doyle has written numerous books of poetry, as well as books on William
Carlos Williams and James T. Baxter, a biography of Richard Aldington, plus
critical essays on Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D. and others. In Paper
Trombones Doyle shares musings on poetry – his own and others’
– drawn from informal journal notes of the past thirty years. Born in
London of Irish descent, Doyle lived in New Zealand before moving to Victoria,
BC. As a poet and academic on three continents, Doyle recalls fascinating
encounters with prominent literary figures – from Ted Hughes and Sylvia
Plath to Basil Bunting, Anne Sexton, Robert Creeley, James Wright, Robert
Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Woodcock and various Canadian poets. His
Collected Poems will be published in November, 2010.
Carla Funk
Carla Funk was born and raised in Vanderhoof, the geographical centre of B.C.
and one of the earliest Mennonite settlements in the province. Having grown
up in a world of logging trucks, storytellers, ladies’ sewing circles, and
rural realism, she turned to poetry as a place to set down the images of her
upbringing. Her newest collection is entitled Apologetic,
published by Turnstone Press. She now lives with her
husband and daughter in Victoria, where she served as the City’s inaugural
poet laureate from 2006-2008. She teaches in the University of Victoria’s
Department of Writing.
Miles Lowry
Miles Lowry lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada where he
is Artistic Co-Director for Suddenly Dance Theatre. Lowry’s cinematic
poem Opium, based on French poet Jean Cocteau, was produced for Canadian
television and selected for the 2007 Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center
in New York City. A short film, Aisling - We Saw a Vision, was recently
produced for Bravo!fact. Author of five previous books of poetry, he is also
known as a painter, sculptor, photographer and theatrical designer. His work
is seen in a wide variety of exhibitions, performances and publications.
Al Maclachlan
Journalist, documentary writer/director and music video director Al MacLachlan
has written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and
the Georgia Strait. After studies at Concordia University (Fine Arts)
and Seneca (Film and Television) and wide travels in Europe and Mexico, Al
MacLachlan now resides in Gibsons, BC. After the Funeral, his first
novel, was published in 2006. A new novel, Murmurs of the Dead, will
be published in November, 2010 by Ekstasis Editions.
Manolis
Manolis was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek
island of Crete in 1947. He emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he attended
Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree
program. He has written three novels and a many collections of poetry. After
working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver, and stock broker,
he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening, and
traveling. Towards the end of 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox
and independent publishing company in Surrey BC with the goal of publishing
literary books. His recent books include Triptych (Ekstasis Editions)
and Opera Bufa (Libros Libertad).
George McWhirter
George McWhirter was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is a writer, translator,
editor, teacher and was Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate. In 1957 he
began a “combined scholarship” studying English and Spanish at Queen’s University,
Belfast, and education at Stranmillis College, Belfast. At Queen’s he was
a classmate with the future literary critic Robert Dunbar and the poets Seamus
Heaney and Seamus Deane. After graduating, McWhirter taught in Kilkeel and
Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland, and in Barcelona, Spain, before moving
to Port Alberni, B.C. Canada. He received his M.A. from the University of
British Columbia, where he studied under Michael Bullock and J. Michael Yates.
His first book of poetry, Catalan Poems, was a joint winner of the
first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe’s Beware, Soul Brother.
In March 2007, he was named Vancouver’s inaugural Poet Laureate for a two-year
term. He currently writes full–time and lives in Vancouver with his wife.
They have two children.
Robert Priest
Robert Priest is the author of fifteen books of poetry. His most recent book
is Reading the Bible Backwards. He won the Acorn People’s Poetry Award
for his now classic Mad Hand (1988). In his alias as Dr. Poetry he
wrote and performed thirteen segments for CBC radio’s spoken-word show
Wordbeat. As a songwriter, he co-wrote the number one hit, "Song
Instead of a Kiss," for Alannah Myles. His Aphorisms have already appeared
in The Farmer’s Almanac, and Colombo’s Canadian Quotations.
His musical play Minibugs and Microchips received a $25,000.00 Chalmer’s
Award. Both of his books of poems for children, Daysongs Nightsongs
and The Secret Invasion of Bananas are on the CBC’s recommended
reading list. As a teacher/workshop leader he has been described as “Ontario’s
most popular poet in the schools” by Today’s Parent Magazine.
He is also a highly respected journalist for Toronto’s weekly Now
magazine.
Duncan Regehr
Duncan Regehr works in the literary, visual and performing arts. Among his
published works, The Dragon’s Eye, Corvus Rex, Chrysalid and Scarecrow combine
prose, poetry and visual imagery. His paintings are found in collections and
galleries worldwide. Also a classically trained actor, he performs and directs
for stage, film, radio and television.
He is a Royal Canadian Artist, a recipient of the American Vision Award of
Distinction in the Arts, and holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts, honoris causa
from the University of Victoria.
D.C. Reid
D.C. Reid’s Love And Other Things That Hurt, and The Hunger
were shortlisted, in their separate years, for the Dorothy Livesay Award,
BC’s highest prize for a book of poetry. Among his many other awards, Reid
has taken silver twice in the Bliss Carmen award. His work has been translated
into Hindi and Spanish. His most recent book of poetry is What It Means
To Be Human.
Linda Rogers
Canadian People’s Poet for the year 2000, Linda Rogers is currently
the Poet Laureate for Victoria. The grandmother of four writes poetry, fiction
and non-fiction. Her latest novel is The Third Day Book, second in
The Empress Trilogy.
Stephen Scobie
Stephen Scobie is a Canadian poet, critic, and scholar. Born in Carnoustie,
Scotland, Scobie relocated to Canada in 1965. He earned a PhD from the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver after which he taught at the University of
Alberta and at the University of Victoria, from which he recently retired.
Scobie is a founding editor of Longspoon Press, an elected member of the Royal
Society of Canada, and the recipient of the 1980 Governor General’s
Award for McAlmon’s Chinese Opera (1980) and the 1986 Prix
Gabrielle Roy for Canadian Criticism.
George Stanley
Born and raised in San Francisco, Stanley was part of the San Francisco Renaissance
in the 1960s, which also included Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser.
He received his bachelor's degree from San Francisco State University in 1969,
and a master's degree in 1971. In the 1970s, Stanley moved to British Columbia,
first living in Vancouver for five years, then Terrace in northern British
Columbia, where he worked as an instructor in the English department at Northwest
Community College. In Vancouver in the early 1970s Stanley became associated
with New Star Books, and The Grape, an alternative newspaper. He
has published several books of poetry, including A Tall Serious Girl (his
selected works) and Vancouver: A Poem. In 2006 he won the Shelley
Memorial Award. He is retired and again lives in Vancouver.
Charles Tidler
Charles Tidler's stage plays have had productions throughout Canada, across
the United States, at the Edinburgh Festival, and in London's West End. Achievements
include two National Radio Awards, a Chalmers Outstanding PlayAward, Canada
Council and B.C. Arts Council awards, and a Governor General's Award nomination
in drama. He is also an award-winning poet and a spoken jazz artist. His first
novel, Going to New Orleans, was published in 2004. The father of
two sons, Charles makes his home in Victoria. A collection of poetry, Straw
Things: Selected Poetry and Song, 1963-2007, was published in 2008.
Ilya Tourtidis
Ilya Tourtidis was born in Greece in 1949. He moved to Australia when he was
four years old and to Canada when he was fifteen. Educated at the University
of Victoria, he worked as a teacher and later as a School Counselor in the
Comox Valley where he now resides. He was Co-winner of the Gerald Lampert
Award in 1994 for his first book of poems, Mad Magellan's Tale. A
subsequent collection of his poetry, The Spell of Memory was published
in 2004. This was followed by a further collection, Path of Descent and
Devotion, published in 2009. In addition to poetry, Ilya Tourtidis also
writes screenplays, novels, and children's stories.
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott, a poet whom the Times of London called “one of the best in
the world” is recognized as seminal voice in world literature, known for his
exploration of Caribbean culture. Born in Saint Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles,
educated in Jamaica and now residing in Trinidad and New York, Derek Walcott
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 for his “poetic oeuvre
of great luminosity” and “historical vision.” As a poet and playwright Walcott
examines the Carribean’s fusion of Indigenous, African, Asian and European
streams in books such as Omeros, a loose reworking of Homer, and
his most recent volume, White Egrets, a celebration of the life and
language of the West Indies.
Back to top
