He was an early member of The Kootenay School of Writing in the 1980s, writing poetry and prose at the intersection of queer identity and LANGUAGE poetics. A runner-up in the Three-Day Novel Contest in 1989, Denisoff's debut novelDog Years was published in 1991 by Arsenal Pulp Press while he was a Ph.D. student at McGill University. The novel, about a protagonist with HIV/AIDS, was a finalist for the Hugh Maclennan Prize in 1992 and the Norma Epstein Award. In 1994, Denisoff published a poetry collection, Tender Agencies, and edited the anthology Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose. His second novel, The Winter Gardeners, was published in 2003, and in 2004 he published The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories. His academic publications include Erin Mouré and Her Works, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840-1940, and Sexual Visuality from Literature to film: 1850-1950. He is the editor of The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, a special issue of Victorian Review on Natural Environments, and another for Victorian Literature and Culture on Scales of Decadence, as well as being a co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence and the digital humanities project The Yellow Nineties Online. He has also been a co-editor of the journals White Wall Review, Nineteenth Century Studies and Feminist Modernist Literature. He is the recipient of the President's Award from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association and the Sarwan Sohata Distinguished Scholar Award from Ryerson University, and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Exeter, Cambridge University, and Queen Mary -- University of London.
Personal life
He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his partner Morgan Holmes.
Works
Fiction
Dog Years
The Winter Gardeners
Poetry
Tender Agencies
Anthologies
Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories
Arthur Machen: Decadent and Occult Works
Academic
Erin Mouré and Her Works
Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence
Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840-1940
Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film: 1850-1950
The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture
Natural Environments guest edited special issue of Victorian Review
The Yellow Nineties Online
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
Scales of Decadence guest edited special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture