Member Profile

Gary Geddes was born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1940. He completed a doctorate at University of Toronto and has taught at various institutions in Canada and abroad, including Western Washington University, where he was Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture. Geddes has written and edited fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, translation, criticism, non-fiction, and anthologies and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Lt.-Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti. In addition to editing several major teaching anthologies for Oxford, he was the founding editor of Studies in Canadian Literature, Quadrant Editions and Cormorant Books. He served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, Green College (UBC), Vancouver Island University, Vancouver Public Library and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Best known as a poet, Geddes has recently produced four books of acclaimed non-fiction: Sailing Home, Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, Drink the Bitter Root and Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care. His most recent publications are The Resumption of Play (poetry) and The Ventriloquist: Four Poetic Narratives from the Womb of War. He is at work on a play called Norwegian Rabbit about Trotsky on the morning of his assassination in Mexico City, and on a memoir and long poem. He lives on Thetis Island with his wife, novelist Ann Eriksson.