Contributor Biographies
Jars Balan is an Edmonton author, poet, editor, and literary translator. He is the administrative coordinator of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. A specialist in the history of Ukrainians in Canada, he has written and published extensively on Ukrainian Canadian literature and drama.
Pamela Banting is the author of Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics and the editor of the anthology Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape. She teaches creative nonfiction, nature writing and environmental literature, literary theory, and North American literature in the English Department, University of Calgary. She is the inaugural president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (www.alecc.ca).
Douglas Barbour is the winner of the Stephan Stephansson Award for Poetry and the author of many books of poetry, including Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour (NeWest Press 1984), Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdc press 1990), Fragmenting Body etc. (NeWest Press/SALT Publishing 2000), Breath Takes (Wolsak & Wynn 2001), and, most recently, with Sheila E. Murphy, Continuations (University of Alberta Press 2006). His critical works include Michael Ondaatje (Twayne Publishers 1993), and Lyric/Anti-lyric: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (NeWest Press 2001). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton.
Donna Coates teaches Canadian and Australian literatures in the Department of English, University of Calgary. She has published numerous essays and book chapters on Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand women’s responses (fiction and drama) to the First World War, and Australian and Canadian women’s responses (fiction and drama) to the Second World War, and Australian women’s responses (fiction) to the Vietnam War. With Sherrill Grace, she is co-editor of Canada and the Theatre of War: Eight Plays (2008).
Sherrill Grace is Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia where she teaches Canadian Literature. Her most recent books include Theatre and Autobiography (Talonbooks 2006), co-edited with Jerry Wasserman, and Inventing Tom Thomson (McGill-Queen’s 2004). Her biography of Sharon Pollock, Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock (Talonbooks) was published in the spring of 2008.
Lisa Grekul is a creative writer and a literary scholar whose research focuses on Canadian literature (minority/diasporic writers, in particular). Her first novel, Kalyna’s Song, published by Coteau in 2003, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Best First Book Award and her second book, Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (University of Alberta, 2005), for the Kobzar Literary Award. Grekul teaches Canadian literature in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna.
Helen Hoy teaches English and Women’s Studies at the University of Guelph. She has published Modern English-Canadian Prose (Gale 1983), The Native in Literature (ECW 1987), co-edited with Thomas King and Cheryl Calver, and published articles on Canadian fiction, Hugh MacLennan, Gabrielle Roy, Robertson Davies, Henry James, and Alice Munro. Her latest book, How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada (University of Toronto Press 2001), examines reading and teaching First Nations writing by cultural outsiders.
Frances Kaye teaches Native Studies, Canadian Studies, and Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and occasionally at the University of Calgary. Her study of arts audiences on the Prairies, Hiding the Audience, was published by the University of Alberta Press in 2003. She also considers the streets and jails to be her classrooms.
George Melnyk is Associate Professor, Canadian Studies and Film Studies, Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary. He is a cultural historian specializing in two distinct areas: Alberta’s literary identity and Canadian cinema. In the area of Alberta literature, he is the author of the two-volume, Literary History of Alberta (1998–99) and co-editor of The Wild Rose Anthology of Alberta Prose (2003).
Anne Nothof is Professor of English at Athabasca University. She has published critical essays in journals such as Theatre Research in Canada, Modern Drama, Mosaic, and the International Journal of Canadian Studies, and in two texts on postmodern theatre: Siting the Other, and Crucible of Cultures. She has edited a collection of essays on Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock for Guernica Press, a collection of essays on Alberta theatre for Playwrights Canada Press, and an issue of Canadian Theatre Review on Alberta theatre. She is a board member and editor for NeWest Press, board member for AU Press, and past president of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. She is also editor for the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia (www.canadiantheatre.com).
Christian Riegel is Associate Professor and Head of English at Campion College, University of Regina. He teaches Canadian literature and has published Twenty-First Century Canadian Writers (Thomson-Gale 2007); Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning (University of Alberta Press 2005); Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning (University of Manitoba Press 2003); A Sense of Place: Re-evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (University of Alberta Press 1998); and Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence (University of Alberta Press 1997). He is currently working on a monograph on mourning and memorial in the works of Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, and Birk Sproxton.
Malin Sigvardson is Visiting Assistant Professor at the English Department, Stockholm University, Sweden, and at the Centre for Modern Languages at Stockholm School of Economics. Her PhD thesis “The Constitution of Movement in Rudy Wiebe’s Fiction: A Phenomenological Study of Three Mennonite Novels” (Stockholm University) was accepted in 2006.
Fred Stenson has written fifteen books (eight fiction, seven non-fiction). His historical novels The Trade and Lightning won the Grant MacEwan Author’s Prize. The Trade also won the Writers Guild of Alberta George Bugnet Novel Prize and the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and was nominated for the Giller Prize. He is director of the Wired Writing Studio at the Banff Centre and has been a regular columnist for AlbertaViews Magazine since its inception in 1999. He is a former president of the Writers Guild of Alberta and a current board member of the Writers Union of Canada. His third historical novel The Great Karoo was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, and was published by Doubleday Canada in 2008.
Aritha van Herk is a University Professor and Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is a novelist, writer, teacher, and public intellectual. Her first novel, Judith, received the Seal First Novel Award in 1978. Her second novel, The Tent Peg, appeared in 1981, and her third novel, No Fixed Address, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1986. Her most recent novel is Restlessness (1998). She is the author of hundreds of reviews and articles on contemporary literature and history. Her nonfiction Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, won the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award for Alberta Writing in 2002. Audacious and Adamant: The Story of Maverick Alberta accompanies a permanent exhibit, inspired by her earlier book, which was recently installed at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and active in the literary and cultural life of the West, the nation, and the world.