Catherine Owen (writer)


Catherine Owen is a Canadian from Vancouver.

Poetry & Other Genres

She is the author of ten collections of poetry, among them Riven, Dear Ghost,, Designated Mourner, Trobairitz, Seeing Lessons and Frenzy, which also won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2010. Her poems are included in national and international periodicals and several recent anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC while she has creative non-fiction work inThis Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone. Stories have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Memewar Magazine, Lit n Image and TORONTO Quarterly.
Catherine Owen's work has been reviewed by Quill and Quire, Urban Graffiti, The Bull Calf Review, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, while also being the subject for the academic paper entitled Catherine Owen’s “Dodo” as Animal Rights Theory by Terry Trowbridge, published in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature from the University of Calgary, and another essay, Catherine Owen's "Severance Package" and the Limits of Ecological History also by Trowbridge, published in Rampike from the University of Windsor. She has also published a volume of essays and memoirs called Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse, edited a collection of interviews and writing practices known as The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything You Wanted To Know That Your MFA Didn't Teach You and has a compilation of short stories/sliver fictions called The Day of the Dead, out from Caitlin Press in 2016. In 2020, Wolsak and Wynn has released her anthology of grief memoirs by 24 Canadian writers titled Locations of Grief: an emotional geography. Her reviews of poetry books can be found on Marrow Reviews, Canadian Literature, The Malahat and CNQ. As a musician she has released CDs with the metal bands Inhuman and Helgrind and a vinyl through her solo project Grieve. She has also performed three one woman plays, collaborates with multi-media artists and runs the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz.

Awards

  1. Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2010
  2. Nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award and the BC Book Prize, along with the George Ryga Award, the Re-lit Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Individual poems have been shortlisted for the CBC Award, the Earle Birney Prize and ARC's Poem of the Year.