Brian Bartlett
Brian Bartlett was born in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, in 1953, grew up in Fredericton, lived for 15 years in Montreal, and moved to Halifax in 1990 to teach creative writing and literature at Saint Mary’s University. He will retire from teaching in June 2018. He has published seven collections and six chapbooks of poems, as well as Wanting the Day:Selected Poems, which was published internationally (by Peterloo Poets of Cornwall, England, and Goose Lane Editions in Canada) and won the 2004 Atlantic Poetry Prize. His other honours have inclued two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes, first prize in the Petra Kenney poetry awards, and the 2009 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. In 2014 Fitzhenry & Whiteside published his first book of prose, Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar (a 366-paragraph book of days going from April 1st to the following March 31st), followed by Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal (Gaspereau Press, 2017), a “plein air” experiment, drafted outdoors by various bodies of water (lakes, rivers, brooks, ponds, marshes, bays, waterfalls, etc.). A selection of Brian’s prose on poetry from over two decades is gathered together in All Manner of Tackle: Living with Poetry (Palimpsest, 2017).
He has also edited the Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan; a book of prose, Don McKay: Essays on His Works; selections of poetry: Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski and, all from The Porcupine’s Quill, The Essential James Reaney, The Essential Robert Gibbs, and The Essential Dorothy Roberts; and The Child Alone, an anthology of childhood poems from which parents and other adults are largely marginalized or excluded. His wife is Karen Dahl, a Halifax Regional Library system manager, and their two children are Josh and Laura.
AWARDS
Winner of Malahat Review Long Poem Prize 1992, for “Underwater Carpentry”
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Winner of Malahat Review Long Poem Prize 1999, for “Hawthornden Improvisations”
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Winner of Petra Kenney Internatioanal Poetry Prize 2001, for “Foot-doctor for the Homeless”
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Shortlisted for Atlantic Poetry Prize 2003, for The Afterlife of Trees.
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Winner of Atlantic Poetry Prize 2004, for Wanting the Day: Selected Poems.
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Winner of Acorn-Plantos Award for Poetry’s Poetry 2008, for The Watchmaker’s Table.
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Shortlisted for J. H. Abraham Prize for Poetry 2015, for Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar.
