Dianne Hicks Morrow has roots in three Atlantic provinces. She was conceived in Newfoundland, and born in Saint John, NB to her Newfoundland war bride mother and her Navy father, who was raised on a farm in Hicks Settlement, New Brunswick, far from the sea. Morrow graduated in Honours English from UNB and taught junior high school in Saint John and Vancouver before moving to Prince Edward Island thirty years ago. She married an Islander and gave birth to two Island sons. (Despite her island credentials, she has had to accept she will never qualify as a true islander.)
On Prince Edward Island she worked as an adult educator for seven years and in the women's movement and the literacy movement for over twenty years, alternating between volunteer and staff positions in each.
Morrow enjoys giving poetry readings and writing workshops to school students and adults. Her favourite workshop topics are how to unleash the writer within all of us, how anything can spark a poem, and how to make time to write. Her own writing flows from the cast of characters and stories in her extended family as well as her love of the outdoors and passion for social justice.
Awards
1999 Island Literary Awards of the PEI Council of the Arts: 2nd place, Milton Acorn Poetry Contest (for "The Devil Sends")
1996 Island Literary Awards: 1st place, Milton Acorn Poetry Contest (for "Selected Poems")
1996 19th Annual Atlantic Writing Competition of the NS Writers' Federation: 2nd place in poetry (for "Polio Kick")
1995 Island Literary Awards: 3rd place, Milton Acorn Poetry Contest (for "From Eight to Forty-Eight: A Chronology")
1993 Island Literary Awards: 3rd place, Carl Sentner Short Story Contest (for "Is Anybody Alive Here?")
1990 Canada's Literacy Volunteer Award
1967 John F. Kennedy Award for the greatest contribution to American Studies (for honours thesis, "The Theme of Death in the Poetry of Robert Frost") presented by Robert F. Kennedy at UNB Fall Convocation
Selected Publications
Long Reach Home (Acorn Press, 2002) ISBN I-894838-00-9
Selected Anthologies
L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (University of Toronto Press, 1999)
Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land (Acorn Press, 2001) ISBN 0-9698606-9-2
Books in Print
Morrow, Dianne Hicks
Long Reach Home, Poetry (Acorn Press, 2002) ISBN I-894838-00-9, $15.95
Dianne Hicks Morrow 228 West Covehead Rd.,York, R.R. 1, PE C0A 1P0 Canada , (902) 672-2013
morrow@isn.net
http://www.acornpresscanada.com/
