Born in Scotland, Stephen Scobie is a critic and a poet who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1980 and the Prix Gabrielle Roy for Canadian Criticism in 1986. A founding editor of Longspoon Press, his literary criticism includes books on bpNichol, Leonard Cohen, Sheila Watson and Bob Dylan. His first book of poetry, Stone Poems, was published by Talonbooks in 1974. His critical work bpNichol: What History Teaches, published in 1984 is part of the Talonbooks New Canadian Criticism Series, edited by Frank Davey.

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. In addition, he co-founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984. Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.