Todd Swift

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Todd Swift bigraphy, stories - Canadian poet

Todd Swift : biography

April 8, 1966 –

Todd Swift (born April 8, 1966) is a British-Canadian poet, screenwriter, editor, and university professor based in the United Kingdom.

Background

Swift was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, (Argotist Online) and raised in Saint-Lambert, Quebec. He received a B.A. in English from Concordia University (Montreal) and a Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. He became British on April 3, 2013, at Westminster Town Hall, Marylebone, London.

While attending university, Swift was one of Canada’s most successful parliamentary debaters. He was President of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate and twice won the award for Top Speaker at the McGill University Winter Carnival Debating Tournament, as well as many other awards. In Montreal, he also ran the international cabaret, Vox Hunt, which featured, among others, regular performances by Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright. Swift was also half of the electronic music-poetry duo Swifty Lazarus, also featuring composer-trombonist Tom Walsh. In the 1990s, Swift wrote hundreds of hours of television (mostly animation) for HBO, Paramount, Hanna-Barbera, Fox, Cinar and DIC Entertainment, and was story editor for many episodes of anime show Sailor Moon. He also worked for editor Ned Hartley at General Media, Inc. (Penthouse) for several years as a writer and editor of erotica.

Swift is the author of eight full collections of poetry, published in Canada, England and Ireland; his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Marick Press, USA, in 2014. He is also a prolific anthologist, and editor of other poets’ work. His poems have been translated into Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Korean. He has written for a number of publications, poems and/or reviews appearing in journals such as Poetry, The Globe and Mail, Poetry London and The Guardian.

In 2004 he was Oxfam Great Britain’s Poet-in-residence, running their poetry series in London, and editing books, a DVD and three CDs to help raise funds for the charity, retiring from this work in 2012. Swift is a tutor with The Poetry School. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University, England, having previously lectured at Budapest University (ELTE), London Met, and Birkbeck. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism after Fr. Oliver Brennan worked closely with him for several years on the road to Rome; they are currently editing a book together, The Poet’s Quest For God.

From 2005 on Swift has run the literary blog Eyewear. The blog is archived by the British Library. He runs the indie press Eyewear Publishing Ltd.