Reading at Campion College, University of Regina

March 29, 2011

7:30 p.m.

Lower Commons

Free Parking in Lot 3M

All Welcome!

Dennis Cooley was educated at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Rochester, where he wrote the first doctorate on Robert Duncan. For many years he has taught in the English Department at the University of Manitoba. He is especially interested in American writing, the languages of orality and print, Canadian literature, modern and postmodern writing, poetry and poetics, and literary theory.

He has been active in prairie literature as teacher, editor, anthologist, publisher, critic, theses advisor, theorist, and as teacher of creative writing. He was a founding editor of Turnstone Press; has served as organizer of literary conferences at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba; and was a founding member of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, of which he currently is past-president.

Cooley has published over 20 titles. A collection of critical material, The Vernacular Muse, considers in two of its essays the role of eye and ear in Canadian poetry. One other long piece lays out some principles of lineation. Cooley is completing several books, among them literary travel journals; a collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch; two separate series of metapoems—the muse sings and abecedarium; departures, a long poem on a medical theme; and a long poem, love in a dry land, that plays off Sinclair Ross’s novel, As for Me and My House.

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan but grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960′s where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960′s where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. After teaching poetry and poetics at the University of Calgary for many years, he now lives in Vancouver where he writes and is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective.

He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter, West Coast Line and the Literary Review of Canada. His book of prose-poems, Waiting For Saskatchewan, received the Governor-General’s Award in 1986 and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry in 1992. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian cafe won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction in 1996. A collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (2000) was awarded the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Writing on Canadian literature. His latest collections of poetry are Sentenced to Light (Talonbooks, 2008), is a door (Talonbooks, 2009), and a selected poetry edited by Louis Cabri, The False Laws of Narrative (Laurier, 2009).