Derek Webster

Derek Webster received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis before founding and editing award-winning arts magazine Maisonneuve. His first collection of poems, Mockingbird, was a finalist for the 2016 Gerald Lampert Award for best poetry debut in Canada, and his second book, National Animal, was a finalist for the 2024 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Both collections were published by Véhicule Press. In the words of Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Diane Seuss, “National Animal embodies the body politic, entangled in war and estrangement, and the human animal caught in a vanishing natural world. From Joni Mitchell to Blanche DuBois, and in forms that range from the sonnet to an epic, physics-driven creation myth, Webster uncovers the universe’s capacity to ‘equilibrate’ without a modicum of sentimentality.” Webster lives in Montreal and Toronto.