GRIFFIN TRUSTEES

SCOTT GRIFFIN is Chairman and founder of The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. In addition he is Chairman, Director and majority shareholder of General Kinetics Engineering Corporation and Advance Precision Limited, which manufacture automotive parts (both companies have design and manufacturing facilities in the Toronto area) and Chairman, Director and majority shareholder of House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books. As a Director of Canadian Executive Services Overseas (CESO), a Volunteer Advisor to CESO and a Director of African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) Canada, Griffin devotes a third of his time on this basis. In 2006, he published a memoir entitled My Heart is Africa about his two-year aviation adventure throughout that continent. He is also Chancellor of Bishop’s University, Chairman of the Governors of Sedbergh School and a Director of DGC Entertainment Ventures Corp. His interests include sailing, skiing, flying, English literature and travel to remote places. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, published in March 2003, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has translated Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik), and Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (with Munir Akash). She compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993). She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and in 1998, was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. In 2006, she won the Robert Creeley Award, named after the renowned poet and former Griffin Poetry Prize judge who died in March, 2005. She teaches at Skidmore College, and lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison, and their son, Sean-Christophe.

ROBERT HASS was US Poet Laureate from 1995-97, a position he used to battle American illiteracy and promote awareness about the environment. Awarded the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. His most recent volume of poetry, Time and Materials, was honoured with the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. He also published the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology, and his published books of poetry include Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. He’s co-translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, including A Treatise on Poetry, and he’s edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Thomas Transtromer and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Robert Hass’s deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found the River of Words poetry contest.

ROBIN ROBERTSON is from the north-east coast of Scotland and now lives in London. His poetry appears regularly in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books and is represented in many anthologies. Published in Britain by Picador and in the US by Harcourt, A Painted Field won the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award. His second collection, Slow Air, appeared in 2002. The following year he edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, which collects seventy commissioned pieces by international authors. In 2004 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has recently published The Deleted World, a selection of new versions of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, and a translation of Medea. His third collection, Swithering, won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award and the 2006 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

DAVID YOUNG is the author of the plays Glenn, Inexpressible Island, Clout, Love is Strange and Fire which have been widely produced in Canada, the United States and Europe. In a former life, he was President of the Coach House Press for ten years. David has also published two novels and written extensively for film and television. Young recently completed a screenplay about an armored car heist and is currently adapting Alistair MacLeod’s novel, No Great Mischief for the stage, to be produced next season in Toronto. In addition, he has written a six-hour mini-series about medical relief work in the middle of the civil war in south Sudan, being shot in South Africa in the winter of 2003/04.