Todd Swift

Todd Swift was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Good Friday, 1966, and grew up in St-Lambert. He was one of Canada's top-ranked student debaters throughout high school and university. He graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. In the 1990s he helped develop spoken word in Canada, with his poetry cabarets. His CD-length experimental text-music collaboration with Tom Walsh, Swifty Lazarus: The Envelope, Please, was released by Wired On Words in 2002. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, he is core tutor with The Poetry School, and a lecturer in creative writing and English literature at Kingston University. His recent collection of critical essays about Anglo-Quebec poetry, Language Acts, co-edited with Jason Camlot, was a finalist for the 2007 Gabrielle Roy Prize. His poems have appeared in the major anthologies The New Canon and Open Field; and his poem "Gentlemen of Nerve" was selected to appear in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008. He is the editor of many significant international poetry anthologies, including Poetry Nation, Short Fuse, and 100 Poets Against The War; and is the poetry editor of Nthposition. In 2005, he edited a special section on The Young Canadian Poets for New American Writing. He has had four full collections of poems published by DC Books in Montreal. As Oxfam Great Britain's first Poet-in-residence, 2004-2008, he ran the influential Oxfam Poetry Series, and edited the best-selling CDs, Life Lines and Life Lines 2--Poets for Oxfam. In 1997, Swift moved to Budapest, then to Paris in 2001. He now lives and works in London, England, with his Irish wife, Sara.