Contributor Biographies for Brick 88

Héctor Abad is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist from Medellín, Colombia. Oblivion: A Memoirwill be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June 2012, and A Culinary Treatise for Sorrowful Womenby the Pushkin Press in March 2012. His most recent book is Traiciones de la memoria.

Will Aitken has worked as a film critic and arts journalist for the CBC, BBC, and NPR, and his writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the Threepenny Review, the Globe & Mail, and the National Post. He has published three novels: Realia, A Visit Home, and Terre Haute. A co-founder of Montreal’s Librairie L’Androgyne, and a guest curator at the Harvard Film Archive, he teaches cinema at Dawson College.

Robin Benger has made more than one hundred documentaries in sixty countries, but all things considered, he would rather have opened the batting for the New South Africa. As his expulsion from that country precluded that, he happily played twenty summers at #4 for York Cricket Club in Toronto.

John Berger is an artist, essayist, novelist, and critic. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, From A to X: A Story In Letters, and most recently, Bento’s Sketchbook, published by Verso in London and Pantheon in New York in 2011.

John Biguenet has published seven books, including The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories and Oyster, a novel, as well as such plays as The Vulgar Soul, Rising Water, Shotgun, and Night Train. He is the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Robert Boyers is editor of the quarterly, Salmagundi, and director of the NYS Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of nine books, including The Dictator's Dictation: Essays on the Politics of Novels and Novelists. He teaches at Skidmore College.

Grant Buday’s most recent book is Stranger on a Strange Island, a memoir about moving from Vancouver to Mayne Island.

James Campbell is the author of several books, including Talking at the Gates, a biography of James Baldwin, and Syncopations, a collection of essays. He is an editor and columnist at the Times Literary Supplement in London.

Jeramy Dodds lives in Calgary, Alberta. His first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds, was published by Coach House Books.

Leonard Gardner is the author of the novel Fat City, and was the screenwriter for the film version, directed by John Huston and starring Jeff Bridges, Stacy Keach, and Susan Tyrell; Yaqui Lopez, Jack Cruz, and Benny Casing appeared in the film in minor roles. A Guggenheim fellow, Gardner lives in Northern California.

Laurie D Graham is a poet, teacher, and assistant editor of Brick. When she writes, she puts a D in the middle of her name, sans period. Sometimes people get annoyed at that.

Andrew Jamison was born in County Down, Northern Ireland, in 1986 and educated at Queen Mary, University of London and the University of St Andrews. His first short collection, The Bus from Belfast, will be published in the U.K. in November 2011.

Robert Kroetsch was a poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. In June 2011, five days away from his eighty-fourth birthday, Kroetsch was killed in a car accident not far from his home in Leduc, Alberta.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of twelve or fourteen books of fiction. He is at work on his thirteenth or fifteenth. He lives in Claremont, California, where he teaches at Pomona College, and in Maine.

Deborah Luster is a photographer living in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Galway, Ireland. She has published two monographs with Twin Palms Publishing, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, 2003 (with C.D. Wright) and Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, 2011.

Anne McLean translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, and other writings by a number of authors, including Héctor Abad and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Her most recently published translations are Anatomy of a Momentby Javier Cercas, From the Observatory, by Julio Cortázar,and Good Offices(translated in collaboration with Anna Milsom) by Evelio Rosero.

Alayna Munce grew up in Huntsville, Ontario, and has lived for many years in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. The author of When I Was Young and In My Prime, she is currently working as an editor and the production manager at Brick Books, while wrestling a new novel.

Walter Murch is a film editor, sound designer, director, translator, and amateur astronomer. His pioneering sound and picture editing work on films include The Conversation, The Godfather, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, and Cold Mountain. He is author of In the Blink of an Eye, a book about the craft of film editing, and is the subject of The Conversations by Michael Ondaatje. His latest film work is Philip Kaufman’s Hemingway & Gellhorn, currently in post-production.

Tara Quinn is a contributing editor of Brick. She lives in Scotland.

Shane Rhodes is the poetry editor of Canada’s national poetry magazine, ARC. His most recent book of poetry is Err, published by Nightwood Editions.

John Ralston Saul is the author of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, A Fair Country, and The Collapse of Globalism. He also serves as the general editor of the Extraordinary Canadians biography series.

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who works at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His main focus has been the quantum theory of gravity, to which he has made many contributions. He has also worked on cosmology, foundations of quantum theory, particle physics, theoretical biology, and economics. He is the author of three books: Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, and The Trouble with Physics. His current book projects concern the reality of time. Born in New York City and educated at Hampshire College and Harvard University, he is a very happy immigrant to Canada and Toronto.

Jennifer Toews is a third generation librarian originally from Saskatchewan who works with literary papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

David Thomson is the author of the Biographical Dictionary of Film. He is the online film critic for The New Republic. Born and raised in London, he now lives in San Francisco.

Aritha van Herk writes fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and reviews. She has written many ficto-critical responses to Robert Kroetsch, her phantom Alberta precursor. She lives in Calgary.

Eleanor Wachtel is the host of CBC Radio’s Writers & Company, which recently won the New York Festival Award. She also hosts “Wachtel on the Arts” on Ideasand the series, Books on Filmat the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Fred Wah has been involved in writing, editing, and teaching since the 1960s. His many books include Diamond Grill, a biofiction; Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, a collection of essays; and two collections of poetry, Sentenced to Light, and is a door. A selected poetry edited by Louis Cabri, The False Laws of Narrative, was also published in 2009. He splits his time between the Kootenays in southeastern B.C. and Vancouver.

Rudy Wiebe’s latest books are Rudy Wiebe: Collected Stories, 1955–2010, and the biography Big Bearin the Extraordinary Canadians series. He lives in Edmonton.

Melora Wolff has published recently in the Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, the Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Best American Fantasy. Currently, she teaches nonfiction at Skidmore College and works with the NYS Summer Writers Institute.