Donna Kane divides her time between Rolla, BC in Treaty 8 Territory, and Halifax, NS, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. A recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture, and the British Columbia Medal of Good Citizenship, her poems, short fiction, reviews and essays have been published widely.

In her memoir, Summer of the Horse (Harbour, 2018), Donna Kane describes leaving a twenty-five-year marriage to be with a wilderness guide, Wayne Sawchuk, who is confident in nature. Expecting to depart with him on a three-month horse-packing expedition, her plans are kiboshed by a serious injury to a gelding that requires her to stay home and attend to the horse's recovery. As a novice horsewoman, she eventually describes her inaugural trail ride into an area dubbed the "Serengeti of the North," the Muskwa-Kechika protected area. With honesty and humility, she describes finding her place in the world and rethinking her assumptions about the wild far north. Her soul-searching non-fiction story will particularly appeal to readers with an abiding interest in either horses or ecology.

In her third collection of poems, Orrery (Harbour $18.95) Donna Kane explores ideas of consciousness, transformation and space travel through the theme of Pioneer 10, an American space probe launched in 1972 to study Jupiter’s moons. The probe was retired in 2003 when it was hurled away from the solar system. (Orrery is the word for a mechanical model of the solar system, or of just the sun, earth, and moon, used to represent their relative positions and motions.)

DATE OF BIRTH: February 23, 1959

PLACE OF BIRTH: Dawson Creek

AWARDS: Lina Chartrand Award for Poetry 2000; Finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award.

BOOKS:

Somewhere, A Fire (Hagios Press, 2004)
Erratic (Hagios Press, 2007)
Summer of the Horse (Harbour, 2018) $19.95 978-1-55017-819-7
Orrery (Harbour, 2020) $18.95 978-1-55017-918-7
Asterisms: Poems (Harbour, 2024) $22.95 9781990776717

[BCBW 2024] "Poetry"