Tom Wayman

I am a writer and teacher who, although born in Ottawa Valley in Ontario, has lived much of my life in British Columbia. I hold a BA in Honours English from the University of British Columbia, where I won the English Honours Medal and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; subsequently, I obtained a Master of Fine Arts in English and writing from the University of California at Irvine. I have published more than a dozen collections of my poems since 1973, besides two books of my cultural and critical essays, and have edited several poetry anthologies. A consistent focus of my attention has been a accurate depiction of daily employment, and the ways a job affects people's lives in the hours both on and off work. Most recently I have been concentrating on fiction, publishing a collection of stories and a collection of novellas in 2007. I have a particular interest in creative writing pedagogy, and have also been instrumental in the founding of three alternate, arts-based writing programs: the Vancouver centre of the Kootenay School of Writing, the Kootenay School of the arts in Nelson, B.C., and the Nelson Fine Arts Centre. I have also been writer-in-residence at a number of institutions, including the University of Windsor, University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto. I was the Fulbright Visiting Chair in creative writing at Arizona State University in winter 2007. When not teaching, I am the Squire of "Appledore", my estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern B.C., where I raise vegetables and flowers.