Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen was born in New Westminster, British Columbia. He earned a BA from David Thompson University Centre and an MA and PhD from the University of Calgary. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Vestiges (2014), Transnational Muscle Cars (2003), Dwell (1994), and Down Time (1990), which won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. Writing in The Globe and Mail, critic Clint Burnham described his work as “constructions of texts that rely on the reader to produce meaning, that rely on a gap between lines and meanings, and that collage various registers of discourse, from literature to economics, into an unstable whole.”

Derksen has also written the collection of essays, Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (2009) and several books of art and architectural criticism. A former professor of English at Simon Fraser University, he now serves as their Dean and Associate Provost, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. He is a founding member of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver and a former editor of Writing magazine. He lives in British Columbia.