Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
- Excerpted from Phil Hall personal biographical statement.
Phil Hall was born in 1953 and raised on farms in the Kawarthas region of Ontario. He attended the University of Windsor in the 70s, where he studied writing with Eugene McNamara, Alistair MacLeod, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. He received an MA in English and Creative Writing.
His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published in Mexico City in 1973. Since then he has published numerous other books of poems, three chapbooks, and a cassette of labour songs. Among his titles are: Homes (1979), Old Enemy Juice (1988), The Unsaid (1992), Hearthedral – A Folk-Hermetic (1996), and recently Trouble Sleeping (2000). Five of his books have been published by Brick Books.
Trouble Sleeping (2000) was nominated for the Governor General's Award for poetry in 2001.
Hall has taught writing and literature at York University, Ryerson University, the Kootenay School of Writing, and many colleges. He has been poet-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, the Kingston Writer's Workshop, Sage Hill Writing Experience (Sask.), The Moosejaw Festival of Words, and elsewhere. He was literary editor at This Magazine for three years in the early 90s, and currently teaches a poetry workshop at George Brown College, and Canadian Literature at Seneca College, both in Toronto, as well as writing and editing educational books for various publishers.
Over the years, he has collected two full decks of random playing cards from the streets, as well as many found photographs. He is learning to play clawhammer banjo.