Doug Beardsley

Who is Doug Beardsley?

Doug Beardsley is a Canadian poet and educator. He has collaborated with numerous other writers including Al Purdy, Theresa Kishkan and Charles Lillard.

He was born in Montreal, Quebec and studied at Sir George Williams University. There, Beardsley came under the poetic tutelage of Irving Layton, with whom he corresponded until Layton's death in 2006. Beardsley has lived in Victoria, British Columbia since 1974.

Beardsley earned a Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and an M.A. in English from York University. He has lectured and taught at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France; the University of Bordeaux; the Victoria Indian Cultural Centre, and the University of Victoria. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry which been widely anthologized. In 1989, he was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and trees were planted in Israel in 1996 in recognition of his services to Holocaust remembrance and education.

In 2005, Beardsley caught the media's attention when he began offering a second-year English course on "Hockey Literature and the Canadian Psyche," examining the place of hockey in the literature and culture of Canada.