GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE is an internationally-renowned poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, librettist and scholar whose books have won him many honours, including the Portia White Prize, the Bellagio Center Fellowship, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry, and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize. His narrative poem Whylah Falls won the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry and was chosen for CBC's inaugural Canada Reads competition. Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, Clarke has taught at Duke and Harvard, and presently resides in Toronto where he teaches African-Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Clarke was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2008, and served as Canada's 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2016-17.