Tanis Rideout

Tanis Rideout is a poet and writer living and working in Toronto. In the fall of 2005 she released her first full-length book of poetry Delineation, exploring the lives and loves of comic book super-heroines, which was praised as a “tantalizing, harrowing read.” It has been featured on CBC Radio’s Bandwidth with Alan Neal and Definitely Not the Opera with Sook-Yin Lee. In the spring of 2005 Rideout joined Sarah Harmer to read a commissioned poem on Harmer’s I Love the Escarpment Tour to draw attention to damage being done to the Niagara Escarpment by ongoing quarrying. Subsequently a performance of the poem appeared on the DVD of the tour - Escarpment Blues. In 2006 she was named the Poet Laureate of Lake Ontario by the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and toured with the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie to draw attention to environmental justice issues on the lake. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous quarterlies and magazines and received grants from local and national arts councils. An excerpt from her new poems Arguments with the Lake received second prize in the CBC Literary Awards and was called Macewanesque in scope, [it] invokes in the reader a sense of timelessness and breathless wonder. The full collection will be released by Wolsak and Wynn, Spring 2013. Her first novel, Above All Things will be released in Canada on June 19, 2012. It has already been praised widely – Joseph Boyden called it “simply breathtaking,” and Alison Pick said “Prepare to be dazzled.” Above All Things was named one of the five “Big Buzz” books at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011 and will be published in the US and UK in early 2013.