Phil Hall

In Windsor, Ontario, in 1976, Hall started Flat Singles Press, producing broadsides & chapbooks. After university, he lived in Vancouver, where he was a member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union, the Vancouver Men Against Rape Collective, and the Starvation Army Band. In the late 80s he often wrote reviews of poetry and children’s literature for Books In Canada, and was the Literary Editor for This Magazine. He also edited (with Andrew Vaisius) a short-lived journal called Don’t Quite Yr Day-Job.

Hall has taught writing and literature at York University, Ryerson University, George Brown College, and Seneca College. He has been writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, the University of Windsor, the University of Western Ontario, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, the Pierre Berton House, and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

In 2011, Hall won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry in English, for his collection, Killdeer, a work the jury called “a masterly modulation of the elegiac through poetic time.” [2] Killdeer also won the 2012 Trillium Book Award,[3] and was shortlisted for the 2012 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.[4] That was his second Griffin shortlist nomination: in 2006 his book An Oak Hunch was shortlisted.