Ken Belford

Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta, and grew up in Vancouver. An early advocate for the nascentecology movement, he homesteaded in Northwestern BC in the late 1960s with his wife and daughter. For thirty-five years they operated asoft paths eco-tourism business there in the remote headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers.

The “self-educatedlan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but attempts to write from nature and our relationship to the land.

Currently living in Prince George, BC, he continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms espoused by what he calls the “tribal schools” of poetry. His six previous books of poetry are; (Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken and ecologue).