Priscila Uppal

Priscila Uppal was born in Ottawa in 1974 and currently lives in Toronto where she is a poet, fiction writer, academic, and professor of Humanities and English at the undergraduate and graduate levels at York University. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Toronto Arts Council. Her creative and academic interests frequently intersect, and she has published work that explores the tensions and dynamics between women (particularly in closed societies: schools, nunneries), the nature of human violence, sexuality (including infertility), multicultural clashes (ethnic, religious, geographical), revisionist myth-making (classical myth, biblical myth, historical figures), illness (physical, psychological, cultural), mourning rituals and the expression of grief (towards individuals, communities, abstract concepts), the world of readers and the dangers and benefits of reading and the imagination, as well as the nature of the artistic process, among other things. She has also collaborated with visual artists in the past (Tracy Carbert, Daniel Ehrenworth), and plans on more collaborative projects in the future. She lives with poet and critic, Christopher Doda.

She is the author of five books of poetry: Ontological Necessities (2006), Live Coverage (2003), Pretending to Die (2001), Confessions for a Fertility Expert (1999), and How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998), and the novel The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002). Her work has been translated into Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Korean, Italian, and Latvian. Her second novel To Whom It May Concern was just released by Doubleday Canada, as well as a critical study on elegies, We Are What We Mourn , by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Bibliography
Poetry
How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998)
Confessions of a Fertility Expert (1999)
Pretending to Die (2001)
Live Coverage (2003)
Holocaust Dream (2005)
Ontological Necessities (2006)
Traumatology (2010)

Fiction
The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002)
To Whom It May Concern (2009)

Anthologies
Uncommon Ground: A Celebration of Matt Cohen (2002) - edited with Graeme Gibson, Wayne Grady, and Dennis Lee
Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets (2004) - edited with Rishma Dunlop

Awards
Shortlisted for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize - for Ontological Necessities (2007)