Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939, and he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia.

Studying at UBC in the early 1960s, he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH.

After graduate work with Robert Creeley at the University of New Mexico and with Charles Olson at SUNY, Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at DTUC before moving on to teach at the University of Calgary. A pioneer of online publishing, he has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today.

Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor-General’s Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.

Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013.

Christopher Nealon teaches American literature, the history and theory of poetry, and the history of sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001), and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century(Harvard, 2011), as well as three books of poems, The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004) Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He is currently at work on a book about the limits of academic anti-humanism.

Daphne Marlatt was born in Melbourne in 1941 and spent much of her childhood in Malaysia before emigrating to Canada in 1951. Marlatt was at the centre of the West Coast poetry movement of the 1960s, studying at the University of British Columbia and with many of Donald Allen’s New American Poets, most notably Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Much of her postmodernist writing would be attuned to the adjustments, struggles, and accomplishments of immigrants. While Marlatt attended UBC (1960–1964), her literary associations with the loosely affiliated Tish group encouraged her non-conformist approach to language and etymological explorations.

She was a co-founding editor of two literary magazines: periodics and Tessera. She co-edited West Coast Review, Island, Capilano Review, and TISH. In 2004 she was appointed as the first writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in three decades. She directed the Fiction stream of the Banff Writing Studio from 2010 – 2012.

Her early writing includes prose narratives on the Strathcona neighborhood of Vancouver and of the former Japanese-Canadian fishing village of Steveston, and several poetry books. Selected Writing: Network is a collection of her prose and poetry, published in 1980. More of her writing can be found in The New Long Poem Anthology: 2nd Edition (2000), edited by Sharon Thesen. Daphne Marlatt’s This Tremor Love Is (2001) is a memory book – an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, A Lost Book, to later, more recent sequences.

Marlatt has been a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV. Her recent work includes The Gull, the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese noh theatre, and winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize.

Colin Browne is the author of Abraham (Brick Books, 1987); the critically acclaimed collection of poetry Ground Water (Talonbooks, 2002), which was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award and a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and The Shovel (Talonbooks, 2007), shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award. He was an editor of Writing magazine and co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing, the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters and the Art of Documentary workshops. 

Browne’s films include Linton Garner: I Never Said Goodbye (2003), Father and Son (1992) and White Lake (1989), which was nominated for a Genie for Best Feature Length Documentary. He is currently working on texts for new operas. His recent work explores the history and legacy of the Surrealist fascination with the art of the Northwest Coast and Alaska, and includes the essay “Scavengers of Paradise.” Browne has recently retired from teaching production, screenwriting, and film history at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Bridge Street Books is located 5 blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro, next to Four Seasons in Georgetown at the end of M street

open Monday - Saturday: 11:00am - 9pm
Sunday: 12pm - 6pm
(202) 965-5200

In business for over twenty years, Bridge Street is one of a rare breed these days--a successful independent bookseller. It has what is certainly the best poetry section in Washington, well-stocked in alternative poetry and poetics as well as mainstream. Bridge Street also has extremely good selections in Philosophy, Politics, Cultural Theory, Women's Studies, Film, Music, and other areas. They also have a plethora of quality sale books.

Manager (& well-known poet!) Rod Smith has been organizing readings in the Washington Area since 1988 and has brought Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, John Cage, Kevin Davies, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Tom Raworth, Lisa Robertson, Leslie Scalapino, Chris Stroffolino and many other important writers to DC.