I am a writer, editor and professor. I’m recently back from years abroad in Asia, where I was the inaugural director of the first taught creative writing master’s in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
My most recent book is the climate-crisis novel Our Sands, set in and around Canada’s genocidal, planet-choking tar sands (Penguin Random House, 2020). My first book, the story collection A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, was named to The Globe and Mail‘s Top 100 Books of 2003. My debut novel, a bicycle odyssey, rolled out in 2008. On Earth Day 2012, I released Origins, a book of poems devoted to evolution, energy and extinction as they have been, can be and/or should be viewed at Joggins, Nova Scotia. My second novel, Keeping Things Whole, is a multi-generational smuggling epic of love and death.
I have published nearly 100 book reviews for papers such as The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette and Detroit’s Metro Times.
I have appeared at writing festivals and/or universities in Bali, Malaysia, Iceland, England, Australia, Sweden, Wales, Canada, Singapore and the US.
I wrote the books column for THIS Magazine and was Reviews Editor for the uber-cool Numéro Cinq.