Peacock Blue

Phyllis Webb was born in 1927 in Victoria, BC. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and McGill. The first major publication of her poetry was in Trio (1954), which included poetry by Eli Mandel and Gael Turnbull. For many years she worked as a writer and broadcaster for the CBC, where she created the radio program Ideas in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967 to 1969. Webb served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1980 to 1981 and taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and the Banff Centre. She is a lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets and currently resides on Salt Spring Island, BC.

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry for The Vision Tree: Selected Poems (1982) Phyllis Webb was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1992.

John F. Hulcoop received a BA and PhD from University College London. He emigrated to Canada in 1956 and taught in the English department at the University of British Columbia. Initially a nineteenth-century scholar, Hulcoop has published works on Robert Browning, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Truman Capote, and Virginia Woolf. A longtime critic of Phyllis Webb's work, he edited and wrote the introduction to her Selected Poems 1954-65 (Talonbooks, 1971); he also wrote Phyllis Webb and Her Works (ECW Press, 1990).