Sticks & Stones

George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.

After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.

A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography and youth fiction. His writing has also been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.

Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.

Robert Creeley (1926–2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He was closely associated with the Black Mountain poets.

Gordon Payne is an artist who was born in 1933. He studied at Washington State College and the University of British Columbia. Payne began painting in the 1950s, and was associated with the Op Art movement in Vancouver during the 1960s.