Karen Mulhallen


Karen Mulhallen is a Canadian educator, poet, essayist, critic and editor. She received her BA in 1963 from Waterloo Lutheran University, her MA in 1967, and PhD in 1975, both from the University of Toronto. She taught English at Ryerson University from 1967 to 2014. She served as the poetry review editor of The Canadian Forum from 1974 to 1979, and their features editor from 1975 to 1988. In 1973 Karen Mulhallen became editor-in-chief of Descant until its closure in 2015.

Career

For 42 years, Karen Mulhallen was editor-in-chief of Descant, a Toronto-based quarterly journal of poetry, prose and visual arts. During that time, the magazine won six Canadian National Magazine Awards and the Litho Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Printing Industry.
Until her retirement in 2014, Dr. Mulhallen, a William Blake scholar, was a professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Department of English.
Early in her career Karen Mulhallen was shy about submitting her work for publication until she became involved with Descant in the early 1970s. A prolific writer, she has published 18 books of poetry, a number of edited volumes and dozens of essays and academic articles on the arts both in Canada and in the UK. In 2010 she organized and chaired a symposium, "Blake In Our Time: A Symposium Celebrating the Future of Blake Studies & the Legacy of G.E. Bentley Jr."
Karen Mulhallen has been called a metaphysical poet. Her most recent book of poetry, Code Orange: An Emblazoned Suite is a bilingual edition translated by Nancy Huston.
Her papers are archived at the University of Calgary and at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Selected book publications

Poetry
Edited volumes