***CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOCIATION POETRY AWARD WINNER***
***E.J. PRATT POETRY AWARD FINALIST***
Where Genesis Begins is a collaboration of two of Newfoundland’s foremost artists: Tom Dawe, a profoundly visual poet, and Gerald Squires, a profoundly poetic painter. The book contains thirty-seven poems by Dawe, twenty-nine of which have not been published before, and seventy-one artworks by Squires. The book opens with an essay by Martina Seifert of Queen’s University in Belfast and closes with an afterword by poet, novelist, and essayist Stan Dragland of Newfoundland.

Tom Dawe has been a high-school teacher, English professor, visual artist, editor, writer, and poet. He has published seventeen volumes of work, which include poetry, folklore, and children’s literature. His latest works include Where Genesis Begins (Breakwater, 2009), winner of the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, and Moocher in the Lun (Flanker Press, 2010), winner of the 2010 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards–Bruneau Family Children’s/Young Adult Literature Award.In the 1970s, during the “Newfoundland Renaissance,” he was one of the founders of Breakwater Books, a founding editor of TickleAce, and prose editor of the Livyere, a folklore journal. In 2002, Martina Seifert’s comprehensive study, Rewriting Newfoundland Mythology: The Works of Tom Dawe, was published in Germany and in Cambridge, MA.Tom Dawe is the recipient of many awards and honours. In 2007, he was awarded a lifetime membership for the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador and was elected to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour. In 2010, he was named St. John’s Poet Laureate. In 2012, he was named a member to the Order of Canada and also to the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Tom Dawe's profile page

Gerald Squires was born in Change Islands, Newfoundland, in 1937. He obtained much of his early training in art in Toronto, where his mother, a Salvation Army officer, was stationed when Squires was twelve. In 1969 he returned to live in Newfoundland with his wife Gail and daughters Meranda and Esther, settling in 1971 at the Ferryland lighthouse residence and then moving to Holyrood in 1983. Squires received the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Ted Drover Award for Achievement in the Visual Arts in 1984 and an Honorary Doctorate from Memorial University in 1992. In 1999 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and was also appointed Member of the Order of Canada. He received the Golden Jubilee Award from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2003, and in 2008 he was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Arts Hall of Honour. Major exhibitions have traveled across Canada, and his works have been included in more than 300 group exhibitions in Newfoundland, Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France and India.Squires received the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Ted Drover Award for Achievement in the Visual Arts in 1984 and an Honorary Doctorate from Memorial University in 1992. In 1999 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and was also appointed Member of the Order of Canada. He received the Golden Jubilee Award from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2003, and in 2008 he was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Arts Hall of Honour. Major exhibitions have traveled across Canada, and his works have been included in more than 300 group exhibitions in Newfoundland, Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France and India.

Gerald Squires' profile page