Adam Dickinson

English Language & Literature

Associate Professor
PhD Alberta

Areas of Specialization:

Adam Dickinson's research and teaching interests include poetics, creative writing, and literary theory.  He has published academic articles on contemporary poetry and environmental ethics.  His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies and literary journals in Canada, the UK, the USA, and (through translation) in Poland.  His second and most recent book of poetry Kingdom, Phylum (Brick Books, 2006) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.  His first book Cartography and Walking (Brick Books, 2002) was a finalist for an Alberta Book award.  His current SSHRC funded research on pataphysics and biosemiotics focuses on the implications for environmental ethics of the relationship betweewn poetry that imagines itself as science and science that imagines itself as poetry.  Professor Dickinson also co-edits Brock's literary journal PRECIPICe .

Selected recent publications:

"The Weather of Weeds: Lisa Robertson's Rhizome Poetics." Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge . 15 (2007).

Kingdom, Phylum (poems). Brick Books, 2006. Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, 2007.

"Surreal Ecology: Freud, Zwicky, and the Lyric Unconscious." Lyric Ecology: The Work of Jan Zwicky . Ed. Mark Dickinson, Clare Goulet, and Tim Quick. Toronto: Cormorant Books (forthcoming).

"Other Minds: the Poetics of Teaching and Writing Poetry." Imagination in Action . Ed. Carol Malyon. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2007.

"Lyric Ethics: Ecocriticism, Material Metaphoricity, and the Poetics of Don McKay and Jan Zwicky." Canadian Poetry 55 (2004).

"The Rhythm of Happening: Antagonism and Community in Brenda Longfellow's Our Marilyn and A Balkan Journey . Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12.1 (2003).

Cartography and Walking (poetry). Brick Books, 2002.