Sharon Thesen, P.G. roots

Canadian poetry star Sharon Thesen was born in Tisdale, Sask. and grew up in small towns across Western Canada. One of them was Prince George, graduating from Prince George secondary school in 1963.

She departed for Simon Fraser University an established her writing, editing and teaching career in the Lower Mainland thereafter but always maintaining family and ties to friends in Prince George. Her writing often calls on her time here and her impressions of this place.

She now resides in the Lake Country community near Kelowna. Her last teaching position was at UBC-Okanagan from which she is now retired to the position of professor emerita of Creative Writing.

Her time is now even more concentrated on writing, teaching poetry workshops, and family.

The Receiver is her 13th book. Her first, Artemis Hates Romance, came out in 1980. Her books Confabulations (1984), The Beginning of the Long Dash (1987) and The Good Bacteria (2006) were all nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The latter was also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize while her 2000 volume A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Award.

She was also the editor of multiple anthologies and periodicals and earned additional praise for her editorial work with Ralph Maud on the book Charles Olson And Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence (1999, Wesleyan University Press) depicting the relationship through letters between those two literary figures.