Name Catherine Owen | ||
![]() | ||
Catherine Owen is a Canadian writer and musician from Vancouver, British Columbia. She currently resides in New Westminster by the Fraser River.
Contents
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
- Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2010
- 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).