At Hadrian's Wall
Photo credit: Olga Costopoulos

Bert Almon was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1943 during a hurricane. He has lived a fairly quiet life since. He completed a B.A. at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1965 and a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico in 1971 having written the first dissertation on the Beat poet, Gary Snyder. He came to Canada to teach at the University of Alberta in 1968 and has become a Canadian citizen. He is married to the poet Olga Costopoulos and has four children.

He began writing poetry in 1967. He teaches creative writing, modern literature and autobiography. More than thirty of his poetry students have gone on to publish books. He won the Writers' Guild of Alberta Award for poetry in 1998 for Earth Prime (Brick Books). He has been a Hawthornden Fellow in Poetry and a finalist in the Blackwell's / Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition. His critical works include a study of the Southern novelist, William Humphrey (University of North Texas Press), and a book on autobiographies, This Stubborn Self, (TCU Press, 2002).

Bert Almon's works copyright © to the author.