The Essential Eugene McNamara

Eugene McNamara was a Canadian writer and professor. He was born in 1930 in Oak Parks, Illinois, and received his PhD from Northwestern University. He moved to Canada in 1965 to begin teaching American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, where his influence lives on in the Eugene McNamara Creative Writing Scholarship. He published many books of poetry and short stories between 1965 and 2015, and became known for the direct and musical phrasing of his poetry, and for his character-driven short stories. McNamara died in 2016.

Phil Hall has published twenty books of poetry and many chapbooks. He has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award, and he has twice been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He has served as writer-in-residence at many Canadian institutions, including the University of New Brunswick, and the Pierre Berton House in the Yukon. His most recent work, The Ash Bell (2022), is published by Beautiful Outlaw Press. He lives in Perth, Ontario.