Born in Vancouver in 1939 to an artistic family, Judith Copithorne is a poet and writer who has made notable contributions to concrete poetry and other intermedia contexts from the 1960s through to the present. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was identified as a member of Vancouver’s “downtown poets” and was involved with Vancouver’s alternative art venues, including Sound Gallery, Motion Studio, and Intermedia. She was published in the first issues of blewointment and Ganglia and continues to publish her work today with small or private presses. Her work has been anthologized in New Direction in Canadian Poetry (1971), The Cosmic Chef (1970), Four Parts Sand (1972), THE LAST BLEWOINTMENT ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 1 (1985), The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry, 1998–2008 (2012), and Judith: An Anthology of Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), among other places. Her work has been featured in numerous gallery exhibitions and is widely influential for multiple generations of poets living and working today.
Eric Schmaltz is Writer-on-the-Grounds in the Department of English at York University’s Glendon College, where he teaches and coordinates the certificate in Creative Writing across Contexts. He holds a Ph.D. in English from York University and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Borderblur Poetics: Multimodality and Avant-Gardism in Canada, 1963–1988 (University of Calgary Press) and co-editor (with Christopher Doody) of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (University of Calgary Press). He is also the author of the poetry book Surfaces (Invisible Publishing) and numerous shorter works. His critical and creative work has been published in periodicals and anthologies, including Jacket2, Bomb, Canadian Literature, the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Capilano Review, and BAX 2020: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press). He lives in Tkaronto (Toronto).
