Brad Cran

Brad Cran is a poet, essay­ist and pho­tog­ra­pher. He has been a long­time con­tribut­ing edi­tor at Geist mag­a­zine and has twice curated the widely suc­cess­ful Poetry Bash at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival. Smoking Lung Press, which he founded in 1996, pub­lished dozens of emerg­ing poets for the first time. He was the edi­tor of the antholo­gies Hammer & Tongs and (with Jan Zwicky) Why I Sing the Blues. His own col­lec­tion of poetry, The Good Life (Nightwood Editions), was hailed by the Vancouver Sun in 2002 as the one book of poetry peo­ple should read that year. In 2004, Cran received the Writing and Publishing com­mis­sion at the Vancouver Arts Awards, and, in 2009, Cran and his wife Gillian Jerome were nom­i­nated for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the B.C. Book Prizes for their book Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press), which also won the 2009 City of Vancouver Book Award and raised over $30,000 for the peo­ple of the Downtown Eastside. He is the cur­rent poet lau­re­ate of Vancouver (2009 – 2011).