BIO

That’s me in my backyard in Dunnville, Ontario in the late ’70s.

My latest book is the poetry collection Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (BookThug, 2017). I’m also the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, and two earlier  poetry collections The Dagger Between Her Teeth (ECW Press, 2002) and I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel (ECW Press, 2005)

I’m currently working on a new novel tentatively called The Bone Harvester.

Since the mid-’90s, my writing has been published widely. In 2015 my work was shortlisted for the Lit POP Awards for poetry, and in 2010 I was shortlisted for the K. M. Hunter Artist Award for Literature. From 2007-2011, I produced and hosted the literary radio show “In Other Words” on CKLN 88.1FM. For a decade (1997-2007), I edited and published the literary zine dig. You can check out information about the dozen back issues here, but very few of the limited edition copies remain. For Toronto’s now-defunct Word, I wrote the monthly zine review column “Serial Escapades” (Sept. 1998-2000), and the book column “Under Cover” (2002-2004) for Hive Magazine.

I also do manuscript evaluations on a freelance basis. If you have a novel, poetry or short story manuscript in need of an objective assessment, I am a knowledgeable, insightful, approachable, critical and articulate editor, and I love making manscripts better. Contact me for details.

I love living in both an intensely urban environment as well as a more isolated rural area with moose and deer for neighbours, and so I divide my time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario.

This is my beloved dog Edgar, a pug and black lab mix. His interests include eating snow, chasing balls, pretending he’s a lifeguard, and snoring under my desk.

When I’m not working on literary projects or hiking around looking for moose tracks, I’m probably playing hockey. Until 2013, I was the proud General Manager and Captain of the co-ed hockey club The Screaming Unyons, part of the Good Times Hockey League of the Arts, winners of the 2013 Dominion Award for best Hootenanny performance, and winners of the 2011 Exclaim Cup.

This is the Screaming Unyons in our schoolkid outfits for the 2011 Hockey Summit of the Arts.