Catherine Owen (writer)

Catherine Owen was born and raised in Vancouver where she spent her childhood as the eldest of five siblings. Her first published work was a short story in a chapbook for a Catholic Schools writing contest, when she was 11 years old. During her teenage years Owen performed public readings of her poetry and had her work published by Exile Editions in 1998. To date she has authored fifteen collections of poetry and prose including essays, memoirs, short fiction, and children’s books. Owen currently resides in Edmonton.[1]

Owen has a Master's degree in English Literature.

Owen's work has been reviewed by Quill and Quire,[2] Urban Graffiti,[3] The Bull Calf Review,[4] Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review.[5][6] She has edited a collection of interviews and writing practices known as The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything You Wanted To Know That Your MFA Didn't Teach You (Wolsak & Wynn, 2015). She has a compilation of short stories/sliver fictions called The Day of the Dead, published by Caitlin Press in 2016. In 2020, Wolsak and Wynn released her anthology of grief memoirs by 24 Canadian writers titled Locations of Grief: an emotional geography. Her reviews of poetry books can be found on Marrow Reviews, Canadian Literature, The Malahat, and CNQ.

As a musician she has released CDs with the metal bands Inhuman and Helgrind and a vinyl through her solo project Grieve. She has also performed three one woman plays, collaborates with multi-media artists and runs the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz, as well as hosting a podcast named Ms Lyric's Poetry Outlaws[7] and a kidlit YouTube channel named The Reading Queen. [8]

• Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2010.[9]
• Nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award (1999) and the BC Book Prize (2002), along with the George Ryga Award, the Re-lit Prize (2006, 2018) and the Pat Lowther Award (2018). Individual poems have been shortlisted for the CBC Award, the Earle Birney Prize and ARC's Poem of the Year.[10]
• She has been the subject for the academic paper entitled Catherine Owen’s “Dodo” as Animal Rights Theory by Terry Trowbridge, published in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature from the University of Calgary, and another essay, Catherine Owen's "Severance Package" and the Limits of Ecological History also by Trowbridge, published in Rampike from the University of Windsor.

1. Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (2020) from Wolsak & Wynn
2. Riven (2020) from ECW Press
3. Dear Ghost (2017) from Buckrider Books
4. The Day of the Dead (2016) from Caitlin Press
5. The Other 23 & a Half Hours: Or Everything You Wanted to Know that Your MFA Didn’t Teach You (2015) from Wolsak and Wynn (ISBN 9781928088004)
6. Designated Mourner (2014) from ECW Press (ISBN 9781770412033)
7. Trobairitz (2012) from Anvil Press (ISBN 978-1-897535-97-4)
8. Catalysts: Confrontations with the muse (2012) from Wolsak and Wynn (ISBN 9781894987592)
9. Seeing Lessons (2010) from Wolsak and Wynn.
10. Frenzy (2009) from Anvil Press (ISBN 9781897535004)
11. Dog (2008) from Mansfield Press (ISBN 9781894469340)
12. Fyre (2007) from Above Ground Press
13. Shall: Ghazals (2006) from Wolsak and Wynn (ISBN 189498708X)
14. Cusp/Detritus: An Experiment in Alleyways (2006) from Anvil Press (ISBN 1895636744)
15. The Wrecks of Eden (2002) from Wolsak and Wynn (ISBN 0919897800)
16. Somatic: The Life & Work of Egon Schiele (1998) from Exile Editions (ISBN 1550962345).