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Photo: Ágnes Cserháti

MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS (Canada)

Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and lives in Toronto. She has worked as librarian, bookstore clerk, freelance writer/editor, and is now production manager for Brick Books.

A poet and essayist, Harris has two poetry collections: A Possible Landscape (Brick Books, 1993) and Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press, 2004), as well as journal publications and two chapbooks. She has won both first and second prizes in Arc’s Poem-of-the-Year contest, and second prize in the Short Grain contest and one of CV2's contests. Drowning Lessons was awarded the Trillium Prize for Poetry in May 2005.

In 2007 Prairie Fire awarded Harris first prize in their creative nonfiction contest for the essay "Opening the Griefcase". Her haibun sequence, Reaching Eastend, was nominated for both a National Magazine Award and a Western Magazine Award in 2007.
QUOTATIONS

Drowning Lessons will conduct you to the shadows, the edges, the depths, the biting sense of betweenness in a life that has not thrived. Such a bleak life concentrated in these pages – why is the book so wonderfully satisfying to read? Because Maureen Harris had gone deep, down and in, and returned with news as strange as it is familiar, "How can nothing / have so many shapes and be so hard to hang onto?" Between everything and nothing this compelling book shimmers like a liquid mirror.
Stan Dragland