Stephen Collis

Poet and critic Stephen Collis earned his BA from Victoria University and PhD from Simon Fraser University, where he currently teaches poetry, poetics, and literature. A former member of the Kootenay School of Writing Collective, Collis’s work frequently engages social and economic justice movements. His ongoing Barricades Project crosses genres and forms to consider the politics of poetry writing, poetry reading, and community in the age of various “occupation” movements; titles from this project include the nonfiction Dispatches from the Occupation: A History of Change (2012), the poetry collection To the Barricades (2013), and the novel The Red Album (2013). He is also author of the poetry collections Mine (2001); Anarchive (2005); The Commons (2008); On the Material (2010), which won a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and the collaborative photo-essay and long poem decomp (2013), written with Jordan Scott.

Collis’s works of criticism include Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (2006) and Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (2007). With Graham Lyons, he edited the collection of essays Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (2012).