Born in 1910, Charles Olson's first two books, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville's Moby Dick, and The Mayan Letters (1953), written to Robert Creeley from Mexico, cover a range of subjects-mythology, anthropology, language, and cultural history-and use the fervent informal style that were to distinguish all his discursive prose. Olson's manifesto, Projective Verse, published in 1950, was quoted generously in William Carlos Williams' Autobiography (1951). Olson was rector of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1951-1956, and taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, 1963-1965. Settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he devoted most of his time and energy until his death in 1970 to The Maximus Poems, his most substantial work.
Educated at the University of Michigan, Frances Boldereff (1905-2003) was a James Joyce scholar, typographer and book designer, and single mother who raised her daughter in Brooklyn, New York, while working in the male-dominated publishing industry of the 1940s and 1950s.
Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, BC, before joining the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, in 2005. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent The Good Bacteria (Anansi). Her books include a selected poems, News & Smoke (Talonbooks), Aurora (Talonbooks) and several titles from the 1980s and 1990s from Coach House Press. She has been involved in the Canadian and Vancouver poetry scene for many years.
Ralph Maud (1928-2014) was the author of a number of books on Charles Olsen as well as the editor of a number of books on Dylan Thomas. He was also a noted ethnographer and editor of ethnographic books. Maud was a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
