Morris House Reading Series 2004-2005

These were the writers who came to Bishop's University for the Morris House Reading Series between  2004-2005:

David Solway

David Solway was born in 1941. From McGill University he recieved both a BA in English and Philosophy in 1962, and a QMA in Philosophy in 1966. In the late 1960s he worked as a Lecturer in English Literature at McGill, a broadcaster and scriptwriter for the CBC, and an ESL teacher in Crete. He has taught at Dawson College and John Abbott College in Montreal, and at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In 1999 he was Writer-in-Residence at Concordia University in Montreal. He has won numerous awards and prizes for his work in both poetry and non-fiction. He currently resides in Hudson, Quebec.

Eric Ormsby

Eric Linn Ormsby was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. Presently, he lives and writes in London, England, where he is Professor and Chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has six poetry collections, Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for the best poetry of that year, Coastlines (1992), For a Modest God: New & Selected Poems (1997), Araby (2001), Daybreak at the Straits (2004), and Time's Covenant (2006). His poems have been published in various journals and magazines such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review and anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He has also authored a book of essays on poetry and translation, including Arabic literature.

Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino was born in Montreal, Quebec, into an Italian heritage. His first poetry collection The New World (1997) was nominated for the 1997 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award. His second collection Credo (2000) won the 2001 Canadian Authors Associate Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. He has also written A Lover's Quarrel (2004), a book of essays on Canadian poetry, and With English Subtitles (2004), a third collection of poems.

Robyn Sarah

Robyn Sarah grew up in Montreal and began publishing poems in Canadian periodicals in the early 1970s, while pursuing graduate studies at McGill. Since 1996 she has been a frequent contributor to Canadian newspapers, writing book reviews and op ed pieces on education, literacy, language, and a variety of other subjects. Her column on poetry, Poetic Licence, was a Montreal Gazette monthly feature in 2000-2001. She is the author of several poetry collections, and she has also published two collections of short stories and a book of essays on poetry. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared widely in Canada and the United States, in publications that include The Threepenny Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry (Chicago), The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th edition), and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times.

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