Catherine Owen (writer)

Early life and education

She earned a bachelor's degree in 1999 and master's degree in English Literature in 2001 from Simon Fraser University.

Musical career

She is the singer/bassist for the metal band Grieve (formerly Medea). She also created INHUMAN (2002-2010) and Helgrind (2008-2009) with her co-composer Chris Matzigkeit (1981-2010).

Poetry

She is the author of ten collections of poetry, among them Designated Mourner (ECW Press, 2014), Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012), Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010) and Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009), which also won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2010. Her poems are included in several recent anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mothertongue Press, 2013) and This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone (Caitlin Press, 2014). Stories have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Memewar Magazine, Lit n Image (US) and TORONTO Quarterly.

Catherine Owen's work has been reviewed by Quill and Quire, Urban Graffiti, The Bull Calf Review, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, while also being 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.She has also published a volume of essays and memoirs called Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), 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) and has a compilation of short stories/sliver fictions coming out from Caitlin Press in late 2016.

Awards

1. Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2010
2. Also nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award (1999) and the BC Book Prize (2002), along with the George Ryga Award and the Re-lit Prize (2006).