Trevor Carolan
About Trevor Carolan
Trevor Carolan emigrated with his family to Canada from Yorkshire in l957. They settled in New Westminster, British Columbia. While a high-school student, he began writing at age 17 for The Columbian newspaper before attending UBC and travelling widely in Europe and Asia. He received an M.A. in English at Humboldt State in California, wrote full-time professionally, and served as first Executive Director of the Federation of B.C. Writers in the early l980s. Among a number of teaching appointments, he also served as Literary Coordinator for the XVth Olympic Winter Games Arts Festival in Calgary, 1988.
In 2006, Carolan earned his Ph.D. at Bond University in Queensland, Australia for interdisciplinary studies involving Literature, Ecology and ideas of the Sacred in International Relations. He has published 20 books of poetry, non-fiction, fiction, translations, and anthologies, as well as scores of articles and interviews. His work has appeared in five languages and includes Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock, a memoir of his studies with the late-American writer and activist; Return To Stillness:
Twenty Years With A Tai Chi Master, which received a Best Books of Year
Citation, spiritual category, from New York critics in 2004; and Making
Waves, an edited essay collection on B.C. & Pacific Northwest literature
from Anvil Press.
A former elected municipal Councillor in the District of North Vancouver,
he has been the International Editor of the Pacific Rim Review of Books for
the past decade. Since 2001 he has taught English and Creative Writing at
UFV in Abbotsford, and for several years previous was attached to the
Dept. of Humanities at Simon Fraser University. His half-hour documentary
film Powerground, which explores the environmental crisis through
interviews with acclaimed writers and ecologists, was received
enthusiastically at its premiere in Brussels in Nov., 2015.
In 2016, New World Dharma, his collected interviews and encounters
with Buddhist writers, teachers and leaders was published by State University of New York Press. Ed Sanders, poet and co-founder of The Fugs welcomed it noting, “Congratulations to Trevor Carolan for creating a wise and excellent sequence of essays, accurate historical information, and interviews which provide very useful insights and Buddhist time-tracks to both Buddhist and non-Buddhist readers and researchers.”
