Dennis Cooley was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan in 1944 and currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Dennis earned a Bachelor of Education degree (with Distinction), a Bachelor of Arts (High Honours) degree, and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Saskatchewan, and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Aside from writing, Dennis has taught most of his life. He has worked as professor at St. John's College at the University of Manitoba, where he taught Canadian literature, poetry, creative writing, and literary theory. Dennis describes himself as, “rooted in the prairies, fiddling with forms, swerving among the vernacular, the comical, the meditative, the linguistic, and the personal [and] strongly committed to the local and to contemporary understandings of writing.” He helped to start the Manitoba Writers' Guild and was a founding member of Turnstone Press. Recipient of the 2015 League of Canadian Poets’ Life Membership Award and the 2013 Manitoba Writers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, Dennis Cooley has been a key figure in Winnipeg’s literary community for over 30 years. He has written extensively on Canadian literature, published 20 books of poetry, and edited numerous others.
