Famous Poets from Canada
- Alfred Wellington Purdy, (December 30, 1918 – April 21, 2000) was a 20th-century Canadian free verse poet. Purdy's writing career spanned fifty-six years. His works include thirty-nine books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence, in addition to his posthumous works. He has been called the nation's "unofficial poet laureate" and "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."
- Birthplace: Ontario, Canada
- Edward Alan Sullivan (November 29, 1868 — August 6, 1947) was a Canadian poet and author of short stories. He is noted for his 1935 historical adventure novel The Great Divide, which depicts the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
- Birthplace: Montreal, Canada
- Alden Albert Nowlan (; January 25, 1933 – June 27, 1983) was a Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright.
- Birthplace: Stanley, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies.
- Birthplace: Texas
- Anne Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
Anne Compton (born 1947) is a Canadian poet, critic, and anthologist.- Birthplace: Prince Edward Island, Canada
- Anne Michaels (born 15 April 1958) is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels is the current poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
Anne Szumigalski
Dec. at 77 (1922-1999)Anne Szumigalski, SOM (b. 3 January 1922 in London, England, d. 22 April 1999) was a Canadian poet.- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Arthur Stringer (February 26, 1874 – September 13, 1950) was a Canadian novelist, screenwriter, and poet who later moved to the United States. He published 45 works of fiction and 15 other books, in addition to writing filmscripts and articles. Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.
- Birthplace: Chatham, Ontario, Chatham-Kent, Canada
- Beth Torbert (born June 15, 1971) is an Indo-Canadian singer-songwriter, actress, and motivational speaker best known by her stage name Bif Naked.
- Birthplace: New Delhi, India
- William Bliss Carman, (April 15, 1861 – June 8, 1929) was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years.In Canada, Carman is classed as one of the Confederation Poets, a group which also included Charles G.D. Roberts (his cousin), Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. "Of the group, Carman had the surest lyric touch and achieved the widest international recognition. But unlike others, he never attempted to secure his income by novel writing, popular journalism, or non-literary employment. He remained a poet, supplementing his art with critical commentaries on literary ideas, philosophy, and aesthetics."
- Birthplace: Fredericton, Canada
- Chandra Mayor (born in 1973), is a Canadian poet and novelist whose writings, among other topics, dive into worlds of urban and alternative cultures. She resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
- Birthplace: Winnipeg, Canada
Charles Lillard
Dec. at 53 (1944-1997)Charles "Red" Lillard (February 26, 1944 – March 27, 1997) was an American-born poet and historian who spent much of his adult life in British Columbia and became a Canadian citizen in 1967. He wrote extensively about the history and culture of British Columbia, Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.- Birthplace: Long Beach, California
- Daniel Scott Tysdal (born May 26, 1978) is a Canadian poet and film director whose work approaches the lyric mode with an experimental spirit. In June 2007, Tysdal received the ReLit Award for Poetry. Tysdal was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and was raised on a farm. He received a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Regina (Saskatchewan) in 2003, an M.A. (English) from Acadia University (Nova Scotia) in 2006, and an M.A. (English in the Field of Creative Writing) from The University of Toronto in 2008. He currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is a lecturer in creative writing at The University of Toronto Scarborough.
- Birthplace: Moose Jaw, Canada
- Dave Clark is a Canadian musician from Etobicoke, Ontario.
David Donnell
Age: 85David Donnell (born 13 October 1939) is a Canadian poet and writer. Born in St. Marys, Ontario, Donnell moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1958 before publishing his first book. Poems (1961), During this period Donnell frequented the Bohemian Embassy, where Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Milton Acorn, and other poets established their reputations. In conjunction with John Robert Colombo, Donnell printed Atwood's first book Double Persephone (1961) Donnell Published The Blue Sky poems 1974-77 examining the relationships of his life from an oblique perspective, then Dangerous Crossings(1980) followed by A Poem About Poland Donnell won the Canadian Comic Poet Award in 1981, and the 1983 Governor General's Award for English language poetry for his collection Settlements. Donnell continued publishing with Water Street days (1989) where he examines his past and his childhood; the poems are narrative confessions; and China blues (1992) Donnell's poetry offers perspectives about city life and the stresses and ironic staples of urban life. David Donnell's poetry is known for its escalating fascination with prose fiction that becomes more dominant in the final sections of China Blues and Water Street Days, and becoming an important feature in his publishing of Dancing In The Dark (1996). David Donnell also received the Therafields Chapbook Award in 1986 and the City of Toronto Book Award in 1993.- Birthplace: St. Marys, Canada
David Zieroth
Age: 78Dale Zieroth (born November 7, 1946 in Neepawa, Manitoba) is a Canadian poet. He won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1999 for How I Joined Humanity at Last, and the Governor General's Award for English language poetry in 2009 for The Fly in Autumn.- Birthplace: Neepawa, Canada
- Dennis Beynon Lee OC (born August 31, 1939) is a Canadian poet, teacher, editor, and critic born in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer, well known for his book of children's rhymes, Alligator Pie.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Dionne Brand (born 7 January 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012. She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017 and has won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers' Prize, and the Toronto Book Award.
- Birthplace: Trinidad, Trinidad and Tobago
Don Coles
Age: 97Donald L. Coles (April 12, 1927 – November 29, 2017) was a Canadian poet and novelist. He won the 1993 Governor General's Award for English poetry for his collection Forests of the Medieval World and the Trillium Book Award in 2000 for his collection Kurgan.He was born on April 12, 1927, in Woodstock, Ontario. He attended the University of Toronto and received a B.A in modern History in 1949, and an M.A in English Literature in 1952. He then attended the University of Cambridge, where he eventually earned a second M.A in Canadian Literature. Coles' writing began to take off after he received a British Council grant, which allowed him a year in Italy. Coles spent the following ten to twelve years traveling around Europe and lived in London, Stockholm, Florence, Munich, Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Zurich. Coles had struggled with writing and while in Europe he wrote two unpublished novels. "I was bad at characterization, I was bad at dialogue, I was bad at plot…" he told the National Post.After he returned home in 1965 he joined the faculty of York University, where he worked for 30 years. He taught humanities, and was the director of the creative writing program. Furthermore, he was the senior editor at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 1984 to 1994. Coles was influenced by many British writers during the time he was living in Europe. These early influences were Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Donald Hall, John Berryman and Margaret Atwood, with whom he worked at York University.Coles first began writing poetry around 1966, and soon published his first collection, Sometimes All Over, in 1975 with Macmillan. Coles' first novel, Doctor Bloom’s Story was not published until 2004. His other poetry collections, seven of which were published in Canada and one published in England, included Anniversaries (1979); The Prinzhorn Collection (1982); Landslides: selected poems, 1975-1985 (1986); K. in Love (1987); Little Bird (1991); Forests of the Medieval World (1993); Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm (1994, published in England); and For the Living and the Dead (1996, a translation from the Swedish). Coles died on November 29, 2017 at the age of ninety.- Birthplace: Woodstock, Canada
- Don Rusu Domanski (born 1950) is a Canadian poet who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czechoslovakian, Portuguese, and Spanish. In 2007, he was the winner of the Governor General's Award in Poetry.
- Birthplace: Sydney, Canada
- A man of many talents, Dan Francks (also known as Iron Buffalo) has earned a reputation as an actor, poet, drummer, activist, and jazz musician. Born on February 28, 1932, in Vancouver, Francks began his entertainment career at age 11 in vaudeville and summer stock. After working as a vocalist in radio, he made the transition to television in 1954 on "Burns Chuckwagon from the Stampede Corral." By 1959, he'd landed a spot as a series regular on "R.C.M.P." He worked in TV steadily throughout the '60s, including a recurring role on "Jericho," a show which was cancelled after "Batman" defeated it soundly in its timeslot. In film, his first big role came in 1968's Francis Ford Coppola's "Finian's Rainbow," in which he co-starred with screen legend Fred Astaire. The film failed to launch Francks, and he moved with his wife, Lili Francks, a member of the Plains Cree First Nation, to the Red Pheasant Indian Reserve near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where he became an honorary Cree and earned the name Iron Buffalo. In the '80s, Francks explored voice work, and added his vocals to more than 60 episodes of the popular kids cartoon "Inspector Gadget," on which his daughter, Cree Summer, voiced the precocious Penny. In a career that has spanned five decades, Francks has landed more than 130 roles on film and television, but is best remembered for his work as Walter, the loyal munitions head, of the long-running espionage series "La Femme Nikita."
- Birthplace: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- Don McKay, CM (born 1942) is a Canadian poet, editor, and educator.
- Birthplace: Owen Sound, Canada
- Douglas Gordon "D. G." Jones (January 1, 1929 – March 6, 2016) was a Canadian poet, translator and educator.Born in Bancroft, Ontario, Jones was educated at the private school of Lakefield College School in Ontario, at McGill University and at Queen's University. He received his M.A. from Queen's University in 1954. Jones then taught English literature at the University of Guelph, then Bishop's University and finally the Université de Sherbrooke. In 1969, Jones co-founded the bilingual literary journal Ellipse, which continues to be the only literary periodical in Canada which provides reciprocal translations, in equal measure, of both English and French Canadian poetry. Jones has been a member of the Arts and Advisory Panel of the Canada Council. His 1978 collection, Under the Thunder the Flowers Light up the Earth, received the 1978 Governor General's Award for Poetry. His rendition of Normand de Bellefeuille's Categorics One, Two and Three received the 1993 Governor General's Award for Translation. Considered a seminal figure of the mythopoeic strain of Canadian poetry, Jones is also a highly respected essayist and translator. His key work of critical writing is Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970).
- Birthplace: Bancroft, Canada
- Douglas Valentine LePan, OC, FRSC (25 May 1914 – 27 November 1998) was a Canadian diplomat, poet, novelist and professor of literature. Born in Toronto, Ontario, LePan was educated at the University of Toronto, at Harvard (where he also taught briefly in the late 1930s), and at Merton College, Oxford. During the Second World War he was on staff at the Canadian High Commission in London and then served in the Canadian Army as an artilleryman during the Italian campaign. He joined the Canadian diplomatic service in 1946, and during his years as a diplomat served in London (as special assistant to Lester Pearson in the late 1940s) and in Washington, as well as in Ottawa. He was formally in the employ of the Department of External Affairs until 1959, though for several years during that time he was seconded by the Department of Finance to serve as Secretary for the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects (the "Gordon Commission"); his work drafting the multi-volume Report of the commission was widely praised. LePan left the diplomatic service in 1959 to return to academic life; he taught at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and at the University of Toronto, where he was Principal of University College (1964–1970) and then University Professor and Senior Fellow at Massey College. LePan's wartime experience with the Canadian Army in Italy inspired much of his poetry and one novel, The Deserter (1964). LePan is one of only a few people (Michael Ondaatje and George Bowering are two others) to have won the Governor General's Award both for poetry (1953 for The Net and the Sword) and fiction (1964 for The Deserter, in a highly controversial win over Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel). In 1982 LePan published his first volume of poetry in almost 30 years (Something Still to Find), and in 1990 he created something of a sensation with Far Voyages, a volume largely composed of gay love poetry. (LePan had married, in 1948 to the former Sarah Katharine Chambers; the two remained together until 1971 and had two children, but the marriage was a difficult one, not least of all over issues relating to sexual orientation.) LePan's 1989 book of memoirs Bright Glass of Memory recounts his involvement with several leading lights of the twentieth century, including John Maynard Keynes and T.S. Eliot. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1998; among his other awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal (1976), and several honorary degrees. He remains well known for his war poetry (long poems from the post-war period such as "Tuscan Villa" and "Elegy for the Romagna," as well as shorter, punchier 1980s poems such as "Below Monte Cassino" in which he recalled the events of a generation earlier); for his poems relating to the landscape of Georgian Bay in Ontario; for his love poems; and for lyric poems in which the poet's passion for the natural world is infused with the suggestion of homoerotic passion ("Coureurs de Bois," "A Country Without a Mythology"). His work has been included in many anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry, The Broadview Anthology of Poetry, and Modern Canadian Poets.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Edward Dickinson Blodgett (26 February 1935 – 15 November 2018) was a Canadian poet, literary critic, and translator who won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1996 for his collection Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano (BuschekBooks).
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Émile Nelligan (December 24, 1879 – November 18, 1941) was a francophone poet from Quebec, Canada.
- Birthplace: Montreal, Canada
- Erín Moure (born 1955 in Calgary, Alberta) is a Canadian poet and translator of poetry from languages which include French, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish to English. She is the recipient of several awards.
- Birthplace: Calgary, Canada
- Francis Reginald Scott (1899–1985), commonly known as Frank Scott or F. R. Scott, was a Canadian poet, intellectual, and constitutional expert. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party. He won Canada's top literary prize, the Governor General's Award, twice, once for poetry and once for non-fiction. He was married to artist Marian Dale Scott.
- Birthplace: Quebec City, Canada
- Frances Susan Itani, née Hill (born August 25, 1942) is a Canadian fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is a Member of the Order of Canada. Itani was born in Belleville, Ontario, and grew up in Quebec. She studied nursing in Montreal and North Carolina, a profession which she taught and practised for eight years. However, after enrolling in a writing class taught by W. O. Mitchell, she decided to change careers. She married Tetsuo (Ted) Itani, a retired Canadian Forces officer and humanitarian, in 1967. They reside in Ottawa, Ontario.Itani has published thirteen books, ranging from fiction and poetry to a children's book. Her 2003 novel Deafening was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Award, and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Caribbean and Canada region, and has been published in 16 countries.
- Birthplace: Belleville, Canada
- Frederick James Wah, OC, (born January 23, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, scholar and former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
- Birthplace: Swift Current, Canada
- George Harry Bowering, (born December 1, 1935) is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He has served as Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate. 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 100 books. Bowering is the best-known of a group of young poets including Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, and David Dawson who studied together at the University of British Columbia in the 1950s. There they founded the journal TISH. Bowering lives in Vancouver, British Columbia and is Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, where he worked for 30 years. Never having written as an adherent of organized religion, he has in the past wryly described himself as a Baptist agnostic. 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. When the Indian Hungryalist, also known as Hungry generation, poet Malay Roy Choudhury, was arrested at Kolkata, India, Bowering brought out a special issue of Imago for helping the Indian poet in his trial. Bowering was one of the judges for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.
- Birthplace: Penticton, Canada
- George Elliott Clarke, (born February 12, 1960) is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015 and as the 2016-2017 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His work is known largely for its use of a vast range of literary and artistic traditions (both "high" and "low"), its lush physicality and its bold political substance. One of Canada's most illustrious poets, Clarke is also known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography that he has coined "Africadia".
- Birthplace: Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, Canada
George Frederick Cameron
Dec. at 30 (1854-1885)George Frederick Cameron (24 September 1854 – 17 September 1885) was a Canadian poet, lawyer, and journalist, best known for the libretto for the operetta Leo, the Royal Cadet.- Birthplace: New Glasgow, Canada
- George Woodcock (; May 8, 1912 – January 28, 1995) was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962).
- Birthplace: Winnipeg, Canada
- Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen (1 September 1941 – 29 November 1987) was a Canadian poet and novelist. A "sophisticated, wide-ranging and thoughtful writer," she published more than 20 books in her life. "A sense of magic and mystery from her own interests in the Gnostics, Ancient Egypt and magic itself, and from her wonderment at life and death, makes her writing unique.... She's still regarded by most as one of the best Canadian poets."
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Heather Spears (born 1934) is a Canadian-born poet, novelist, artist, sculptor, and educator. Residing in Denmark since 1962, she returns to Canada annually to conduct speaking and reading tours and to teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops. She has published eleven collections of poetry, five novels, and three volumes of drawings. She specializes in drawing premature infants and "infants in crisis".
- Birthplace: Vancouver, Canada
- Herménégilde Chiasson, ONB (born 7 April 1946) is a Canadian poet, playwright and visual artist of Acadian origin. Born in Saint-Simon, New Brunswick, he was the 29th Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick between 2003 and 2009. He is also currently a professor at Université de Moncton.
- Birthplace: New Brunswick, Canada
- Ibolya "Ibi" Kaslik (born August 20, 1973) is a Canadian novelist, freelance journalist, and teacher of creative writing at the University of Toronto.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Irving Peter Layton, OC (March 12, 1912 – January 4, 2006) was a Romanian-born Canadian poet. He was known for his "tell it like it is" style which won him a wide following, but also made him enemies. As T. Jacobs notes in his biography (2001), Layton fought Puritanism throughout his life: Layton's work had provided the bolt of lightning that was needed to split open the thin skin of conservatism and complacency in the poetry scene of the preceding century, allowing modern poetry to expose previously unseen richness and depth.
- Birthplace: Târgu Neamț, Romania
Jacob Scheier
Age: 45Jacob Scheier is a Canadian poet, born in Toronto in 1980. His debut poetry collection, More to Keep Us Warm, was published by ECW Press in 2007 and was named the winner of the 2008 Governor General's Award for English poetry.A former resident of New York City, Jacob has recently moved back to his hometown of Toronto. Scheier published work in a number of Canadian literary magazines and was co-editor of the York University literary magazine Existere prior to publishing More to Keep Us Warm. He is the son of poet Libby Scheier. He is also a regular contributor to the Toronto alternative weekly NOW. He is currently preparing to teach a course on writing creatively about grief at Ryerson University's School of Continuing Education.- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Jacques Godbout, OC, CQ (born November 27, 1933) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, children's writer, journalist, filmmaker and poet. By his own admission a bit of a dabbler (touche-à-tout), Godbout has become one of the most important writers of his generation, with a major influence on post-1960 Quebec intellectual life.
- Birthplace: Montreal, Canada
Jai West
Jai Tatsuto West (ジェイ・ウエスト born October 24, 1976) is an actor, poet of French Canadian and Japanese descent born in Vancouver, British Columbia and currently based in Tokyo, Japan. He is best known for his work on screen as manic Japanese American gangster Lee in Sion Sono's Hazard (2005), a thief grappling with his sexual identity in Gen Sekiguchi's Survive Style 5+ (2004), and portraying Beethoven in the popular Tokyo Gas commercials. He has appeared in numerous films and television series, from 21 Jump Street (1990) to Takashi Shimizu's The Great Horror Family (2004) and Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006). West has released two spoken word poetry albums in Japanese and English under the pseudonym Lotus Chamelion. In 2018, he became the chairman of Iron Chef Canada.- Birthplace: Vancouver, Canada
- Jalal Barzanji (born 1953 in Arbil northern of Iraq) is a contemporary Kurdish poet and writer. He has served on the board of Writers' Union and was Executive Director of Ministry of Culture in Iraqi Kurdistan. He left Iraqi-Kurdistan in 1996 due to an ongoing civil war in Kurdistan. He has been living in Canada since 1998 after escaping Iraq where he was tortured and imprisoned because of his writings from 1986 to 1989. He was appointed as the Edmonton-PEN Canada Writer-in-Exile for the period 2007-2008. He helped establish the Canadian Kurdish Friendship Association and the Edmonton Immigrant Support Network Society. He has published six books of poetry and was the 2004 recipient of aRISE award. He is due to publish a memoir sometime in October 2011. In the memoir Barzanji writes about his imprisonment in 1986-1989, during which time he endured torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime because of his literary and journalistic achievements—writing that openly explores themes of peace, democracy, and freedom. For those three years, Barzanji wrote only on scrap paper, smuggled into his cell in Iraq. He wrote his memoir during his time as the first Writer In Exile of PEN Canada.
- Birthplace: Iraq
James McIntyre
Dec. at 77 (1828-1906)James McIntyre (baptised 25 May 1828 – 31 March 1906), called The Cheese Poet, was a Canadian poet. McIntyre was born in Forres, Scotland, and came to Canada in 1851 at the age of 24. He worked as a hired hand to begin with, performing pioneer chores that formed the basis of a number of his works. Later, he settled in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he dealt in furniture. There he married and had a daughter and son. He later moved to Ingersoll, Ontario, then a town of 5,000 on the banks of the Thames in Oxford County, the heart of Canadian dairy country at the time. He opened a furniture factory on the river as well as a store which sold furniture, along with such items as pianos and coffins. He was well loved in the community, from which he often received aid in hard times, due in part to his poesy and oratorical skills—he was called on to speak at every kind of social gathering in Ingersoll. The region seems to have inspired him, and it was in celebration of the proud history of Canada, the natural beauty and industry of the region, and especially (as noted above) its cheese, that the majority of his oeuvre was written. The ancient poets ne'er did dream That Canada was land of cream, They ne'er imagined it could flow In this cold land of ice cream and snow, Where everything did solid freeze They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese. from "Oxford Cheese Ode"[1]McIntyre was uninhibited by minor shortcomings—such as his lack of literary skills. The Toronto Globe ran his pieces as comic relief, and the New York Tribune expressed amusement, but their mockery did not dampen his enthusiasm. He is assumed to have continued writing until his death, in 1906. He published two volumes of poetry: Musings on the Canadian Thames (1884); Poems of James McIntyre (1889).McIntyre was forgotten after his death for a number of years, until his work was rediscovered and reprinted by William Arthur Deacon—literary editor of the Toronto Mail and Empire and its successor The Globe and Mail—in his book The Four Jameses (1927). In recent years a volume of his work, Oh! Queen of Cheese: Selections from James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet (ed. Roy A. Abramson; Toronto: Cherry Tree, 1979) collected his poems together with a variety of cheese recipes and anecdotes. However, the greatest boost to his fame probably came from a number of his poems being anthologized in the collection Very Bad Poetry, edited by Ross and Kathryn Petras (Vintage, 1997). This included his masterpiece and possibly best-known poem, "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds", written about an actual cheese produced in Ingersoll in 1866 and sent to exhibitions in Toronto, New York, and Britain: We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese, Lying quietly at your ease, Gently fanned by evening breeze; Thy fair form no flies dare seize.All gaily dressed, soon you'll go To the provincial show, To be admired by many a beau In the city of Toronto. from "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese"[2]An annual poetry contest is held in Ingersoll, Ontario, to honour McIntyre. The contest is sponsored by The Ingersoll Times and the Corporation of the Town of Ingersoll, and includes a cheese-themed poetry competition.- Birthplace: Forres, United Kingdom
Jamie Reid
Age: 83Jamie Reid (April 10, 1941 – June 25, 2015) was a Canadian writer, activist, and arts organizer. He was born in Timmins, Ontario and came of age on the west coast of Canada. Reid co-founded the influential poetry journal TISH in Vancouver in 1961 with George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, and Fred Wah. He published his first collection of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire, in 1969. A short time later he joined the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and stopped writing for 25 years in favour of political activism "because [he] didn’t have a way of working the language of politics into the language of poetry."Reid returned to poetry and cultural criticism in the late 1980s, with a special interest in jazz expressed in many of his works. He lived in North Vancouver with his wife, the painter Carol Reid, since returning to Vancouver in 1990, and their home was a hub of literary activism and activity, including the publication of his local/international avant-garde magazine DaDaBaBy. Reid also edited and contributed to the intergenerational Vancouver literary journal Tads (1996-2001) through which Reid, George Bowering, Renee Rodin, and George Stanley mentored younger writers, including Thea Bowering, Wayde Compton, Reg Johanson, Ryan Knighton, Jason le Heup, Cath Morris, Chris Turnbull, and Karina Vernon.- Birthplace: Timmins, Canada
- Jan Zwicky (born 10 May 1955) is a Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist, and musician.
- Birthplace: Calgary, Canada
- Jane Eaton Hamilton (born July 19, 1954) is a Canadian short story writer, novelist, essayist and poet, who goes by "Hamilton" and uses they/their pronouns. Hamilton has published the novel Weekend (Arsenal Pulp Press 2016), three books of poetry, Body Rain (Brick Books 1992) and Steam-Cleaning Love (Brick Books 1993), Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes (Caitlin Press, 2014), a poetry chapbook (Going Santa Fe, winner of the League of Canadian Poets Poetry Chapbook prize) and two volumes of short fiction July Nights and Other Stories, (Douglas and McIntyre, 1991) and Hunger, (Oberon, 2001). They are also the author, under the pseudonymous name of Ellen Prescott, of the memoir Mondays are Yellow, Sundays are Grey retitled No More Hurt which was included on the Guardian's Best Book of the Year list and was a Sunday Times bestseller. Their books have been shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes, the ReLit Award, the VanCity Award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the MIND Book Prize. Their short work has appeared in such publications as En Route, The Sun, The New York Times, Maclean's, Geist, the Missouri Review, Salon,The Rumpus, The Globe and Mail and Seventeen. They have won many awards for her short work, including, twice, first prize in the CBC Literary Awards (2003/2014), 2015's Lit Pop Prize, judged by George Saunders, twice first prize in the Prism International Short Story Award, Canadian Poetry Chapbook of the Year from the League of Canadian Poets, the event Non-Fiction Award, and many others. They have had Notable essays in BAE twice, and a Notable short story in BASS. Work is upcoming at Gay Magazine and BAX 2020. They were a litigant in the Canadian same-sex marriage case between 2000-2003. They spent several years as a photographer and for years volunteered for the organization Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. Hamilton is also a visual artist. They have two grown daughters and four grandchildren. They are also a Master Gardener.
- Birthplace: Hamilton, Canada
- Jane Siberry ( SIB-ər-ee; née Stewart; born October 12, 1955) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, known for such hits as "Mimi on the Beach", "I Muse Aloud", "One More Colour" and "Calling All Angels". She performed the theme song to the television series Maniac Mansion. She has released material under the name Issa ( EE-sə) – an identity (as opposed to a simple stagename) which she used formally between 2006 and 2009.On August 30, 2005, Siberry was awarded the 2005 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in music by the Canada Council for the Arts.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Jo Walton (born December 1, 1964) is a Welsh-Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002 and the World Fantasy award for her novel Tooth and Claw in 2004. Her novel Ha'penny was a co-winner of the 2008 Prometheus Award. Her novel Lifelode won the 2010 Mythopoeic Award. Her novel Among Others won the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel; Among Others is one of only seven novels to have been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and World Fantasy Award.
- Birthplace: Aberdare, United Kingdom
- Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (November 30, 1872 – January 28, 1918) was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I, and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war.
- Birthplace: Guelph, Canada
- John Pass (born 1947 in Sheffield, England) is a Canadian poet. He has lived in Canada since 1953, and was educated at the University of British Columbia. He has published 19 books of poetry since 1971. His book Stumbling in the Bloom won the 2006 Governor General's Award for English poetry. His most recent book "crawlspace" (Harbour Publishing, 2011) won the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Best Book Award in Poetry) in 2012. Pass taught English at Capilano University from 1975 to 2007. He lives on BC's Sunshine Coast near Sakinaw Lake with his wife, poet, essayist and novelist Theresa KishkanFour of his books of poetry form a linked quartet under the overall title, "At Large": The Hour's Acropolis (Harbour Publishing, 1991) Radical Innocence (Harbour Publishing, 1994) Water Stair (Oolichan Books, 2000) Stumbling in the Bloom (Oolichan Books, 2005)
- Birthplace: Sheffield, United Kingdom
Joseph Sherman
Dec. at 61 (1945-2006)Joseph Howard Sherman (1945 in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia – January 9, 2006 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island) was a Jewish Canadian poet and visual arts editor. He was named to the Order of Canada in 2003. Husband to Ann Sherman. Father of Rebekah Sherman Condon and Matthew Sherman. Grandfather to Autumn West, David West, and Ariel West.- Birthplace: Bridgewater, Canada
- Josephine Jacobsen (19 August 1908 – 9 July 2003) was an American poet, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She was appointed the twenty-first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. In 1997, she received the Poetry Society of America’s highest award, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
- Birthplace: Cobourg, Canada
- Keinan Abdi Warsame (Somali: Keynaan Cabdi Warsame, Arabic: كَينَان عَبدِ وَرسَمَ Kaynān ʿAbdi Warsama), better known by his stage name K'naan (), is a Somali Canadian poet, rapper, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist. He rose to prominence with the success of his single "Wavin' Flag", which was chosen as Coca-Cola's promotional anthem for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Besides hip-hop, K'naan's sound is influenced by elements of Somali music and world music. He is also involved in various philanthropic initiatives.
- Birthplace: Mogadishu, Somalia
- Kristine Sa (June 6, 1982) is a Vietnamese Canadian singer and songwriter.
- Birthplace: Vietnam
- Leonard Cohen, born in 1934 in Montreal, Canada, was a globally recognized musician, poet, and novelist whose influence spanned over six decades. His profound work showcased an extraordinary blend of emotion, intellect, and sheer musicality that earned him a place among the world's most venerated songwriters. Cohen began his career as a poet and novelist, with his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, published in 1956. However, his life took a significant turn when he moved to the United States in the late 1960s and forayed into the world of music. His debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), established him as a folk music icon, with tracks like Suzanne and So Long, Marianne becoming instant classics. Over the years, Cohen produced fourteen studio albums, each demonstrating his uncanny ability to express the human condition through his lyrics and melodies. His most famous composition, Hallelujah, has been covered by countless artists across multiple genres, testament to its universal appeal. In addition to his contributions to music and literature, Cohen was known for his spiritual exploration. Raised in a Jewish family, he had a strong interest in religion that led him to explore Buddhism in the 1970s. For a time, he even resided at a Zen Buddhist monastery in California. This spiritual journey deeply influenced his work, infusing it with themes of faith, redemption, and suffering. Cohen passed away in 2016, leaving behind a rich legacy that continues to inspire and captivate audiences worldwide.
- Birthplace: Westmount, Canada
- Lorna Crozier (born 24 May 1948) is a Canadian poet who holds the Head Chair in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria. She has authored fifteen books and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2011.
- Birthplace: Swift Current, Canada
Louis-Honoré Fréchette
Dec. at 68 (1839-1908)Louis-Honoré Fréchette, (November 16, 1839 – May 31, 1908), was a Canadian poet, politician, playwright, and short story writer. For his prose, he would be the first Quebecois to receive the Prix Montyon from the Académie française, as well as the first Canadian to receive any honor of this kind from a European nation.- Birthplace: Lévis, Canada
Maggie Helwig
Age: 64Maggie Helwig (born 1961) is a Canadian poet, novelist, social justice activist, and Anglican priest.- Birthplace: Wallasey, United Kingdom
- Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher, and environmental activist. Since 1961, she has published seventeen books of poetry, sixteen novels, ten books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Atwood and her writing have won numerous awards and honors including the Man Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents. A number of her works have been adapted to film and television, which has only served to increase her exposure and audience. As a novelist and poet, Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics". Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age. Among her contributions to Canadian literature, Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writers' Trust of Canada.
- Birthplace: Ottawa, Canada
- Margaret Avison, (April 23, 1918 – July 31, 2007) was a Canadian poet who twice won Canada's Governor General's Award and has also won its Griffin Poetry Prize. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Her work has been praised for the beauty of its language and images."
- Birthplace: Cambridge, Brantford, Canada
- Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
- Birthplace: Summerside, Canada
- Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – June 5, 1893) was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first Black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada.Shadd Cary was an abolitionist who became the first female African-American newspaper editor in North America when she edited The Provincial Freeman in 1853.
- Birthplace: Wilmington, Delaware
Michael Lista
Age: 41Michael Lista (born September 1, 1983) is a Canadian poet. He is the author of Bloom, a book of poems about Canadian Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin. He writes a monthly column on poetry for The National Post and lives in Toronto, Ontario.- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Poet, writer and sometime documentary director Michael Ondaatje has written a number of books including several award-winning novels, a memoir and a study of film editing, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002). He remains best-known, however, for The English Patient (1992), which not only won him the Man Booker Prize for Literature but was made into a multiple-award-winning film of the same name by Anthony Minghella.
- Birthplace: Sri Lanka, Colombo
Mohamud Siad Togane
Age: 78Mohamud Siad Togane (Somali: Maxamed Siyaad Toogane, Arabic: محمد سياد توغن), born July 1, 1947, is a Somali-Canadian poet and peace activist.- Birthplace: Somalia
- Effectively cast as both amiable heroes and imposing figures of evil, Italian-born actor Nick Mancuso established himself as a new and valuable performer on stage in productions put on by the Stratford Festival and the Toronto Free Theater. He made his Hollywood motion picture debut in the horror outing "Nightwing" (1979), which proved to be a failure, but Mancuso quickly bounced back with one of his finest performances in "Ticket to Heaven" (1981) as a downtrodden man seduced into joining a cult. From that point onward, he alternated between working in the United States and Canada, including the fondly remembered "Stingray" (NBC, 1985) and its short-lived series offshoot, and such major studio pictures as "Under Siege" (1992) and "Rapid Fire" (1992). Moving back and forth from lead roles to more character-oriented assignments, Mancuso's dark good looks and multilingual abilities also made him the perfect choice to play different ethnicities. Although he was rarely at a loss for employment, Mancuso launched a new career path later in life as an enthusiastic advocate for healthy life choices and homeopathic alternatives to conventional medication. While never a bona fide star by Hollywood standards, Mancuso commanded a great deal respect amongst both his peers and the public for an impressively lengthy and varied acting history in three mediums.
- Birthplace: Mammola, Calabria, Italy
- Norm Hacking (August 1, 1950 – November 25, 2007) was a Canadian folk music singer-songwriter.
- Pamela Porter is an award-winning author.
- Birthplace: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Patrick Anderson
Dec. at 63 (1915-1979)Patrick John MacAllister Anderson (4 August 1915 – 17 March 1979) was an English-Canadian poet. He was educated at Oxford, where he was elected President of the Union, and Columbia. He taught in Montreal at Selwyn House School from 1940 to 1946 and at McGill University between 1948 and 1950. One of his students at both schools was Charles Taylor.In March 1942 Anderson and Montreal Group poet F. R. Scott founded Montreal literary magazine Preview; A.M. Klein and P. K. Page also became part of the editorial group. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Preview's orientation was cosmopolitan; its members looked largely towards the English poets of the 1930s for inspiration."In 1943, critic John Sutherland published a review of Anderson's poetry in rival magazine First Statement which suggested homoerotic themes in his writing, and accusing Anderson of "some sexual experience of a kind not normal"; although Anderson would in fact come out as gay later in life, he was married at the time to Peggy Doernbach, and threatened to sue. Sutherland printed a retraction in the following issue. The incident was little known outside of Montreal at the time, as both magazines had small, primarily local circulations, although it would come to be more extensively analyzed in the 1990s as an important incident in the history of LGBT literature in Canada.Anderson and Doernbach were members of the Labor-Progressive Party, and were active supporters of Labour-Progressive MP Fred Rose. Preview merged with First Statement in 1945 to become Northern Review.Following his divorce from Doernbach in 1950, Anderson left Canada, teaching for two years in Malaysia before returning to England. He subsequently entered into a same-sex relationship with Alistair Sutherland, with whom he co-edited Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship in 1961; in this era, he also published memoirs and travel writing. Despite this, he continued to treat his sexuality as a private matter, declining inclusion in an anthology of gay male literature in 1972. He remained a resident of England for the rest of his life, although he sometimes returned to Canada in the 1970s as a guest lecturer; his final volume of poetry, published in 1977, was titled Return to Canada.- Birthplace: Ashtead, United Kingdom
Patrick Lane
Age: 85Patrick Lane (March 26, 1939 – March 7, 2019) was a Canadian poet. He had written in several other genres, including essays, short stories, and was the author of the novel Red Dog, Red Dog.- Birthplace: Nelson, Canada
Paul Haines
Dec. at 70 (1933-2003)Paul Haines (1933 – January 21, 2003) was a poet and jazz lyricist. Born in Vassar, Michigan, Haines eventually settled in Canada after spending time in Europe, India, and New York City; he had a long stint as a French teacher at Fenelon Falls Secondary School, in Ontario, Canada. Haines's best-known work is Escalator over the Hill, a collaboration with Carla Bley. Haines's daughter Emily Haines is a songwriter and musician with Metric, Broken Social Scene, and Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton. Another daughter, Avery Haines, is a Canadian television journalist and television show host.Pauline Johnson
Dec. at 51 (1861-1913)Emily Pauline Johnson (also known in Mohawk as Tekahionwake –pronounced: dageh-eeon-wageh, literally: 'double-life') (10 March 1861 – 7 March 1913), commonly known as E. Pauline Johnson or just Pauline Johnson, was a Canadian writer and performer popular in the late 19th century. Johnson's poetry was published in Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Johnson was one of a generation of widely read writers who began to define a Canadian literature. While her literary reputation declined after her death, since the later 20th century, there has been renewed interest in her life and works. A complete collection of her known poetry was published in 2002. Johnson was notable for her poems and performances that celebrated her Indigenous heritage; her father was a hereditary Mohawk chief of mixed ancestry. She also drew from English influences, as her mother was an English immigrant. One such poem is the frequently anthologized "The Song My Paddle Sings".- Birthplace: Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, Canada
Peter Blue Cloud
Dec. at 76 (1935-2011)Peter Blue Cloud (Aroniawenrate) (born 1935 - 2011) was a Mohawk poet, and folklorist.- Birthplace: Kahnawake 14, Canada
- Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929) is a Canadian-born poet, academic, and diplomat. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he is best known for his critiques of deep politics and American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Although trained as a political scientist, Scott holds an atypical academic appointment as a poet-scholar in an English department. After receiving undergraduate degrees in philosophy (first-class honours) and political science (second-class honours) from McGill University in 1949, he studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (1949) and University College, Oxford (1950-1952) before receiving a Ph.D. in political science from McGill (with a dissertation on the social and political philosophy of T.S. Eliot) in 1955. He briefly taught in McGill's political science department and spent four years (1957–1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service before joining the speech department of the University of California, Berkeley as a lecturer in 1961. He was subsequently promoted to assistant professor of speech (1962), associate professor of English (1968), and professor of English (1980); since his nominal retirement in 1994, he has served as professor emeritus of English.Notably, he was a signatory in 1968 of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
- Birthplace: Montreal, Canada
Philip Child
Dec. at 80 (1898-1978)Philip Albert Child (January 19, 1898 – February 6, 1978) was a Canadian novelist, poet, and academic.Born in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of William Addison Child and Elizabeth Helen (Harvey) Child graduated from Ridley College, St. Catharines in 1915 and then studied at Trinity College where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree after serving during World War I. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1921 and received a Master of Arts and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was a journalist and taught for a time at the University of British Columbia while writing several novels. In 1942, he became a professor at Trinity College eventually becoming Chancellor's Professor of English.He won the Ryerson Fiction Award twice, in 1945 for Day of Wrath and in 1949 for Mr. Ames Against Time. He also won the 1949 Governor General's Award for Mr. Ames Against Time.- Birthplace: Hamilton, Canada
- Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom; May 25, 1926 – July 14, 2009) was a Canadian science fiction novelist and poet.
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Phyllis Webb, (born April 8, 1927) is a Canadian poet and radio broadcaster. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as "a writer of stature in Canadian letters", and calls her work "brilliantly crafted, formal in its energies and humane in its concern".
- Birthplace: Victoria, Canada
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
Age: 75Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (born July 5, 1949) is an Italian-Canadian poet. In 2005 he became the second Poet Laureate of Toronto. Born in Arezzo, Italy, his family immigrated to Canada in 1952. Di Cicco was brought up in several North American cities, among them Baltimore, Maryland, Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. In the early 1970s he attended the University of Toronto. While working part-time as a bartender at the university, he began to publish poems in little magazines. He has since written 13 books of poetry and in 1978 edited a volume of verse by Italian-Canadian poets, Roman Candles which became a seminal volume for the birth of Italian-Canadian literature. His poems, consisting of deep images in stanzas of free verse - with lines consisting of irregular numbers of syllables and (hypothetical) feet - often referred to di Cicco's immigrant and Italian-family experiences. In books like Flying Deeper Into the Century (1982) and The Tough Romance (1979) he communicated a modern, sensitive awareness of the confusing welter of 20th-century life. Di Cicco's unmetrical but imagistic lines flowed on, often with cumulative power, to release their tension at the end of their stanzas. Di Cicco gradually felt called to a Catholic religious life. Reducing his output of verse, he spent a period in an Augustinian monastery north of Toronto. Di Cicco then undertook religious studies and became a friar with a parish in Brampton, Ontario. In the 1990s he resumed writing and publishing poems, producing a selected volume and several others. In 2005, he was chosen Poet Laureate of Toronto; he published a poem weekly in The Toronto Star Sunday newspaper. In 2004-5 he taught at the University of Toronto. The writer and critic Joseph Pivato edited, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco: Essays on His Works (2011), an important analysis of his poetry. His latest book (2018) is entitled Wishipedia.- Birthplace: Arezzo, Italy
- Promise Jason Jamal Shepherd, professionally known as Promise, is a Canadian Hip-Hop Soul artist/songwriter from Toronto. He is also 1/2 of Hip-Hop supergroup Perfeck Strangers, based in Scarborough, Ontario. Promise has collaborated with Jhené Aiko, Montell Jordan, LeCrae, No Malice, MC Jin, J. Ivy, Marco Polo, eLZhi of Slum Village, Royce Da 5'9" of Slaughterhouse, Rhymefest, Ton3x and many others. He has also collaborated heavily with fellow Toronto native Drake, whom he met on the set of Degrassi: The Next Generation. After being signed back to back for almost a decade, Promise became independent in 2017 and continues to write and record music. His upcoming material features Shad, SonReal, Skyzoo, Andy Mineo, V. Rose, Saukrates of Big Black Lincoln and more!
- Birthplace: Toronto, Canada
- Raymond Lévesque is an actor, singer-songwriter, poet, novelist and playwright.
- Birthplace: Montreal, Canada
Richard Greene
Age: 63Richard Greene is a Canadian poet. His book Boxing the Compass won the Governor General's Award for English language poetry at the 2010 Governor General's Awards.A resident of Cobourg, Ontario, Greene teaches English literature at the University of Toronto. Author of Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius. Virago;(2012)- Birthplace: St. John's, Canada
- Rita Wong (born 1968) is a Canadian poet.
- Birthplace: Calgary, Canada
Robert Bringhurst
Age: 78Robert Bringhurst (born 16 October 1946) is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote The Elements of Typographic Style, a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in June 2013.He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, British Columbia (approximately 170 km northwest of Vancouver) with his wife, Jan Zwicky, a poet and philosopher.- Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
Robert Hilles
Age: 73Robert Hilles (born November 13, 1951) is a Canadian poet and novelist who divides his time between Salt Spring Island and Khon Kaen, Thailand. Born in Kenora, Ontario, Hilles studied at the University of Calgary, earning a BA in Psychology and English in 1976. He also holds an MSc in Educational Psychology, earned at the university in 1985.Hilles lived for many years in Calgary, Alberta and was active in the writing community there. For ten years he acted as the managing editor of Dandelion, the oldest surviving literary magazine in Alberta. He developed the magazine from a small pamphlet to one of the most respected literary magazines in Canada. During that time he also organized many successful readings featuring writers from across the country. In 2001, he moved to British Columbia and has been active in the literary community there, especially on Salt Spring Island where he now lives. With other writers, he helped to set up a scholarship for beginning writers on Salt Spring and also organized a new reading series on the island.He served on the executive of the League of Canadian Poets for five years and in 1996 was sent by the League of Canadian Poets and the Department of Foreign Affairs to represent Canada at an International Poetry Festival in Japan. Hilles won the 1994 Governor General's Award for Poetry for Cantos From A Small Room (1993). In the same year, his first novel, Raising of Voices (1993), won the Writers' Guild of Alberta's George Bugnet Award for Novel. He has published sixteen books of poetry and five books of prose. Wrapped Within Again, New and Selected Poems was published in the fall of 2003 and won the Stephan Stephansson Award for Poetry. His second novel, A Gradual Ruin, was published by Doubleday Canada in 2004. His books have also been shortlisted for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Prize, the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize, the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction.- Birthplace: Kenora, Canada
- Robert Paul Kroetsch, OC (June 26, 1927 – June 21, 2011) was a Canadian novelist, poet and nonfiction writer. In his fiction and critical essays, as well as in the journal he co-founded, Boundary 2, he was an influential figure in Canada in introducing ideas about postmodernism.He was born in Heisler, Alberta. He began his academic career at Binghamton University (State University of New York); after returning to Canada in the mid-1970s he taught at the University of Manitoba. Kroetsch spent several years in Victoria, British Columbia, before returning to Winnipeg, then to retirement in Alberta, where he continued to write. In 2004 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
- Birthplace: Heisler, Canada
- Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in Western America and Canada, often in some poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which carried remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of gold-mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the US.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection Ballads of a Cheechak proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera. Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who were tending to say the same of Kipling, with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as “verse, not poetry”.
- Birthplace: City of Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom
- Robin Francis Blaser (May 18, 1925 – May 7, 2009) was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.
- Birthplace: Denver, Colorado
Roo Borson
Age: 73Ruth Elizabeth Borson, who writes under the name Roo Borson (born January 20, 1952 in Berkeley, California) is a Canadian poet who lives in Toronto. After undergraduate studies at UC Santa Barbara and Goddard College, she received an MFA from the University of British Columbia.She has received many awards for her work, including the Governor General's Literary Award, 2004, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, 2005 for Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida. She currently lives in Toronto with poet Kim Maltman, and with Kim Maltman and Andy Patton is a member of the collaborative performance poetry ensemble Pain Not Bread.- Birthplace: Berkeley, California
- Rosemary Sullivan O.C. (born 1947) is a Canadian poet, biographer, and anthologist.Sullivan was born in the small town of Valois on Lac Saint-Louis, just outside Montreal, Quebec. After graduating from St. Thomas High School, she attended McGill University on a scholarship, and received her bachelor's degree in 1968. After she was married, in 1968, she attended the University of Connecticut, where she received her MA in 1969. She then attended the University of Sussex, receiving a PhD for her thesis "The Garden Master: The Poetry of Theodore Roethke" in 1972 (it was published as a book in 1975). After she completed her PhD, Sullivan moved to France to teach at the University of Dijon, and later at the University of Bordeaux. Two years later she was hired at the University of Victoria, and then in 1977 at the University of Toronto, where she taught until her retirement. In 1978, she decided to dedicate herself to her writing, while still teaching. She is now a Professor Emerita. Sullivan's first collection of poems, The Space a Name Makes, was awarded the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 1968. In 1987 Sullivan began writing a biography of Elizabeth Smart, By Heart, which was published in 1991 by Penguin Books. Sullivan realized that she had a passion for biographies. Her Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, which was published in 1995,' won numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Non-fiction, the President’s Medal for Biography, University of British Columbia, and the City of Toronto Book Award. Another of her biographies, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, was published in 1998. Aside from her writing career, Sullivan has worked with Amnesty International since 1979, and in 1980 she founded a congress to aid its activities. She has travelled all over the world, including Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua.Sullivan was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012. In 2015, she won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for Stalin's Daughter, her biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva.
- Birthplace: Greater Montreal, Canada
- Roy Kenzie Kiyooka, (January 18, 1926 – January 4, 1994) was a Canadian arts teacher, painter, poet, photographer, and multi-media artist of national and international acclaim.
- Birthplace: Moose Jaw, Canada
- Roy Akira Miki, (born 10 October 1942) is a Canadian poet, scholar, editor, and activist most known for his social and literary work. Born in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba to second generation Japanese-Canadian parents, Miki grew up on a sugar beet farm before moving to Winnipeg. His family was forcibly relocated to Western Canada and interned during the Second World War. He earned his B.A. from the University of Manitoba, M.A. from the Simon Fraser University, and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. Miki taught contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University before retiring and holds the title of professor emeritus. He lives in Vancouver. In the 1980s, Miki was a "instrumental" in fighting for redress from the federal government for the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War.In 2002, Miki's book of poetry, Surrender, won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. His poetry focuses on questions about identity, citizenship, race, and place. He is the author of the critical study, Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing (1998), In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011), The Prepoetics of William Carlos Williams (1983), and an annotated bibliography of the poet and novelist George Bowering (1990).In 2006, Miki was made a Member of the Order of Canada and received the 20th annual Gandhi Peace Award for the truth, justice, human rights, and non-violence exemplified in his redress work. The same year, he also received the Thakore Visiting Scholar award and the Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2009, he was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia.
- Birthplace: Winnipeg, Canada
Shane Koyczan
Age: 48Shane L. Koyczan (born 22 May 1976) is a Canadian spoken word poet, writer, and member of the group Tons of Fun University. He is known for writing about issues like bullying, cancer, death, and eating disorders. He is most famous for the anti-bullying poem To This Day which has over 20 million views on YouTube.- Birthplace: Yellowknife, Canada
Shannon Bramer
Age: 51Shannon Bramer (born 1973) is a Canadian poet. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she attended York University before publishing her first book, suitcases and other poems, which won the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Book Award. Over the next few years, she resided in Guelph, Ontario, where she helped found the Bookshelf Poetry Contest. Settling in Toronto, Bramer published scarf in 2001, a book of poems which tells the story of Vera, a single woman working in a scarf store in Hamilton. scarf received praise from Canadian literary critics, perhaps exemplified by the Antigonish Review's comment that it is an "intriguing book about loneliness and searching". 2005 saw Bramer's first book of poems published by Coach House Books, The Refrigerator Memory. Incorporating a broad range of imagery, the poems in The Refrigerator Memory were also well received. Currently, Bramer lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. Her latest publication is the full-length collection of poetry, Precious Energy.- Birthplace: Hamilton, Canada
Sheree-Lee Olson
Age: 70Sheree-Lee Olson (born December 11, 1954) is a Canadian novelist, poet and journalist. She was born in Picton, Ontario on the shores of Lake Ontario and grew up across Canada and in Europe, moving frequently with her family to her father's military postings. Eventually she earned degrees in visual art (York), philosophy (Leuven, in Belgium) and journalism (Ryerson). She was an editor at The Globe and Mail, Canada's leading national newspaper, from 1985 to 2013. Olson's poetry and fiction can be found in Descant and The Antigonish Review. Her essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail and Between Interruptions: Thirty Women Tell The Truth About Motherhood (2007).In 2007-08 she was the Webster/McConnell Fellow in the Canadian Journalism Fellowships Program at Massey College, University of Toronto.Her first novel, Sailor Girl, was published in 2008 by Porcupine's Quill. It got attention across Canada and received several favourable reviews, including those on CBC Radio One Talking Books and in The Globe and Mail. A review in Canadian Literature journal concludes "Olson has announced herself as one of the new bright lights in Canadian literature."In 2011, Olson received a "Bookmark" - a plaque bearing a selection from a notable Canadian literary work - in Port Colborne at Lock 8 on the Welland Canal, site of a key scene in Sailor Girl. Project Bookmark Canada celebrates locally inspired writing by installing Bookmarks in situ.In 2013, producers Markham Street Films announced that Olson's Sailor Girl was under development as a feature film with director Anita Doron. The big screen adaption, with screenplay written by Johanna Schneller, begins filming in the summer of 2014.- Birthplace: Picton, Canada
Sina Queyras
Age: 62Sina Queyras is a Canadian writer. To date they have published seven collections of poetry, a novel and an essay collection. In 2005 they edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets for Persea Books, the first anthology of Canadian poetry to be published by a U.S. press. They later edited Canadian Strange, a folio of contemporary Canadian writing for Drunken Boat, where they are a contributing editor. From 2005 to 2007 Queyras co-curated the belladonna* reading series in New York. Their third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound, received the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and their fourth, Expressway, was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2009 Governor General's Awards.They published their first novel, Autobiography of Childhood, in 2011. The book was a shortlisted finalist for the amazon.ca First Novel Award.Their 2014 poetry collection MxT was again shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and won the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation Awards and the ReLit Award for Poetry. A translation by Marie Frankland was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English to French translation at the 2015 Governor General's Awards.Their work has been published widely in journals and anthologies including Joyland: A hub for short fiction. They teach creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and have taught at Haverford College and Rutgers University.- Birthplace: Manitoba, Canada
Stephanie Bolster
Age: 56Stephanie Bolster (born 1969) is a Canadian poet and professor of creative writing at Concordia University, Montreal. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (1991) and a Master of Fine Arts (1994) from the University of British Columbia. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1998. Bolster's current project, "Long Exposure", is a book-length poem that takes as its starting point Robert Polidori's post-disaster photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl.- Birthplace: Vancouver, Canada
Stephen Rowe
Age: 44Stephen Rowe (born April 7, 1980) is a Canadian poet.- Birthplace: Heart's Content, Canada
- Tim Lilburn (born 27 June 1950) is a Canadian poet and essayist. Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He obtained a B.A. from the University of Regina, a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Gonzaga University, and his PhD from McMaster University.He is the author of several critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including Kill-site, To the River, Moosewood Sandhills and his latest work Going Home. Successful even in the early stages of his career, Lilburn's second work, Tourist To Ecstasy, was shortlisted for the Governor's General's Award but did not win.Lilburn's first glimpse of national approval came in 1995, upon receiving the Canadian Authors Association Award for his work on Moosewood Sandhills. In 2002, Lilburn's Living in the World as if it Were Home became the winner of the Saskatchewan Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Saskatoon Book Award. Eventually, Lilburn went on to win the Governor General's Award in 2003 for his book Kill-site. Lilburn's work, although primarily directed towards a Canadian audience, has received global recognition and numerous volumes of his work can be found translated in Chinese, Serbian, German and Polish. He currently teaches writing at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. In addition to writing his own work, Lilburn is the editor of, and a contributor to, two influential essay collections on poetics, Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy.Lilburn was a judge for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2017 he received HOMER - The European Medal of Poetry and Art
- Birthplace: Regina, Canada
- George William Albert Chapman, né George William Alphred (13 December 1850 – 23 February 1917), was a Canadian poet. Chapman was born at Saint-François-de-Beauce, Quebec (today's Beauceville), and was educated at Levis College. He studied law, afterward engaged in commercial pursuits, and later entered the civil service of the Province of Quebec. Chapman worked for some time as a journalist in Quebec City and Montreal; but in 1902 became a French translator for the Dominion Senate and removed to Ottawa, Ontario.
- Birthplace: Lower Canada
