Description
In the year 2005, John B. Lee was named Brantford’s Poet Laureate in perpetuity. In the same year, he was appointed an Honourary Life Member of both the Canadian Poetry Association and the Ontario Poetry Society. In 2007, he was inducted into the Chancellor’s Circle of McMaster University’s President’s Club, and he was awarded the first recipient of the Souwesto Prize for his commitment to literature in his native region of southwestern Ontario, as well as the inaugural Black Moss Press Souwesto Award for his contribution to the ethos of writing in Southwestern Ontario. He was named Poet Laureate of Norfolk County from 2011 to 2014, and then Honourary Poet Laureate of Norfolk County for life in 2015.
He is the only two-time winner of the People’s Poetry Prize and the 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of Windsor). He has received over eighty prominent worldwide honors for his poetry, including the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, and the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of Windsor). He first won the Winston Collins Award for Best Canadian Poem in 2007, and he won it again in 2012. He has written over seventy books and edited seven anthologies, including two best-selling titles, That Sign of Perfection: poems and stories about hockey and Smaller Than God: words of spiritual longing. In the fall of 2014, he co-edited a special issue of Windsor Review called Alice Munro: A Souwesto Celebration.
Around 500 newspapers around the world have featured his work, which has been translated into French, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. He has given readings in countries as diverse as South Africa, France, Korea, Cuba, Canada, and the United States. Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Australian poet Les Murray, and Senator Romeo Dallaire have all written him letters of commendation. He lives in Port Dover, Ontario, where he works as a full-time author and has been dubbed the best living poet in English by poet George Whipple.
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