Sharon Thesen

Photo by Silmara Emde

A Cascadian poet, writer, editor and critic, Sharon’s eleven books/chapbooks include The Good Bacteria, Oyama Pink Shale and The Receiver. She is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan Campus. She edited two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, two editions of Charles Olson’s correspondence with book designer Frances Boldereff, and a Governor General’s Award–winning selected poems of Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree. While teaching English and Creative Writing at Capilano College (now University), she held various editor positions at The Capilano Review, and while teaching at UBC Okanagan, co-edited, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. She is currently is a contributing editor to Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. Sharon’s poetry workshops (Pinecone Writing Workshops) are attended by Okanagan writers and provide a space for fresh engagements with poetics. Recent writing includes an introduction to Anansi’s “A-list” reprinting of Paulette Jiles’s Waterloo Express and a review of Stephen Collis’s Almost Islands for BC BookLook, a collaborative chapbook with Penn Kemp (P.S., KAL Press 2020), numerous blurbs and endorsements, the odd magazine publication of a poem or two. She is currently working on a prose manuscript. Thesen lives in Winfield, BC.

Selected Poems: The Vision Tree