Bio/ About

with the beautiful Carmella on violin

I’ve been writing since I was a kid, and I was first published at the age of fourteen as one of the winners of This Magazine‘s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Since then my stuff has appeared in piles of journals and anthologies as well as having won a handful of awards.  My first book of poems, These Burning Streets, is published with Combustion Books.

I spent the majority of my adolescence hitch hiking and riding freight trains across the country, living in abandoned buildings, flop houses, tent cities and tree platforms at protest camps. My fiction and poetry have a lot to do with experiences of displacement, class conflict, and social alienation. I like using speculative, fantastical and horrific imagery to make sense of real-world issues and events, both current and historical.

I also write a lot of non-fiction on social and environmental justice issues, queer issues and disability politics. I’ve done broadcast journalism with OPIRG Radio (aka RADIOPIRG) at University of Guelph, and I’m currently doing editorial stuff for Fifth Estate magazine, America’s longest running anti-authoritarian publication which came out of the free press movement of the ’60′s.

Other than that, I don’t really know what else to tell you. I like sleeping in empty boxcars and listening to rain. I also like the fact that my dog’s paws always smell like corn chips.