HAROLD RHENISCH is from the lost orchard culture of B.C.’s Similkameen Valley and the lost German socialist colony of the Southern Okanagan. After playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he studied poetry with P.K. Page, Charles Lillard, Derk Wynand and Robin Skelton. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria (1980) and a MFA from the University of British Columbia (2007). He has published 11 previous full-length books of poems, 4 chapbooks of poetry, 4 books of innovative creative nonfiction memoir, a novel, a translation of a dissident East German playwright, and is an active editor of poetry and non-fiction, with special expertise in cross-genre works. He has won national and provincial awards for poetry, nonfiction, journalism and drama, including a CBC literary prize for poetry, the ARC poem of the year prize, and the George Ryga Prize for “The Wolves at Evelyn.” He spent the spring of 2013 at the Klaustrid Artist’s Residency in Skriduklautur, Iceland, uncovering the secret story of the writer Gunnar Gunnarsson, who tried to change the course of the Second World War through writing poetically-coded novels. He lives in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, where he writes the poetic environmental and phenomenological blog okanaganokanogan.com.
