Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. His 25 books include A Cemetery for Holes, with Tom Prime and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and also a finalist for both the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear next year and AMPERS&THROPOCENE, a collection of his visuals based on the ampersand was published by Penteract Press (UK) in August 2020. He has a PhD in music and has been writer in residence at many universities and libraries. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he holds the David W. McFadden Chair in Diffuse but Earnest Luminosity at the National Rhyme Institute of Canada.