Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets

Robert M. Stamp is a Calgary author who has published both prose and poetry. He earned a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Western Ontario. Tim Bowling has published numerous poetry collections, including Low Water Slack; Dying Scarlet (winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry); Darkness and Silence (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry); The Witness Ghost and The Memory Orchard (both nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award); and his Selected Poems (winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize). Bowling's work in poetry and prose has been honoured with two Canadian Authors Association Awards; two Writers Trust of Canada nominations; a Guggenheim Fellowship; five Alberta Book Awards; the Acorn-Plantos People's Poetry Award; and a Roderick Haig Brown Award nomination. Bowling served as the 2015 Canadian judge for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. dennis cooley was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan. He later moved to Manitoba, where he helped to start the Manitoba Writers' Guild and was a founding member of Turnstone Press. He taught Canadian literature, poetry, creative writing, and literary theory at the University of Manitoba. He has published widely, including well over a dozen volumes of poetry, notably Bloody Jack (2002), and the bentleys (2006). A recipient of the Manitoba Writers' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, dennis cooley lives in Winnipeg. Tammy Armstrong (1974), who grew up in St. Stephen, NB, has lived for eight years in Vancouver, where she earned an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Armstrong won the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick's Alfred G. Bailey Prize 2000. An excerpt from her first novel, Translations: Aistreann (2002), won the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick's David Adams Richards Prize in 1999. Douglas Barbour is the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including Continuations and Continuations 2 (UAP). A long-time resident of Edmonton, he was inducted into the City's Arts & Culture Hall of Fame in 2003. Doug Beardsley is the author of over a dozen books, including The Only Country in the World Called Canada, Kissing the Body of My Lord: The Marie Poems, Dancing Star, and Inside Passage. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Canadian Forum, Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, and American Poetry Review. He is also represented in several anthologies, including The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Poetry. E.D. Blodgett (1935-2018) published numerous books of poetry as well as diverse criticism and literary translations. He was Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He won the Governor General's Award twice, for poetry and translation. From 2007 to 2009 he was Edmonton's Poet Laureate.