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Honours Award

Canada Reads

Moose Jaw Weather

Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada
Festival 2004    July 22 - 25

Joe Rosenblatt

Joe Rosenblatt was born in Toronto, and grew up near Kensington Market. In the 1940’s he attended Lansdowne Public School. He is described as ‘a reluctant student’ who dropped out of high school after grade 10. He has lived in B.C. at Qualicum Beach since 1980 with his wife Faye and his three cats. 

He is a poet, author and artist. His line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets’ books of poetry. Rosenblatt states: "Most of my creativity is cerebral.  My ideas are like rolls of film that get developed in the darkroom of my mind. T he images have infinitesimal dots of meaning that, bit by bit, start to take form in my brain. I distort and twist the mundane world to its essential reality through craft, humour, fantasy, honesty and intensity." 

Joe Rosenblatt has published more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction. Top Soil: Selected Poems 1962-1975 won the Governor General’s Award; Poetry Hotel: Selected Poems 1963-1985 won the BC Book Prize in 1986, A Tentacle Mother, sea sonnets, was translated into Italian. The Voluptuous Gardener is a collection of art and writing from 1973-1996. Brides of the Stream is a book length prose poem about trout fishing near his Vancouver Island home. 

Rosenblatt has been writer in residence at several Canadian universities, as well as the University of Rome and the University of Bologna. Parrot Fever (2003) is his latest book and has just released his first CD, Mental Moonlight.