Wayne Clifford

Wayne Wallace Jordan Clifford (10 May 1944 – 15 April 2025) was a Canadian poet, editor and educator.

Early life and education Clifford was born on 10 May 1944 in Toronto, Ontario. He started writing poetry at the age of twelve. He attended University College at the University of Toronto and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1967. In 1967, he and Michael Ondaatje were the co-winners of the E. J. Pratt Award in Poetry, an annual competition open to students "proceeding toward a first or a post-graduate degree at the University of Toronto".

While an undergraduate Clifford worked as acquisitions editor and typesetter at the newly established Coach House Press. He attended the founding meeting of the League of Canadian Poets in 1966. While at the University of Iowa he held a graduate teaching fellowship with the printer and Cummington Press publisher Harry Duncan. Reviews of his 1976 collection Glass/Passages described him as a "poet with a committed, intelligent voice" writing "pure poetry wrought from his experiences", and the book as a "rich, complex and linguistically challenging collection".

Clifford left teaching in 2004 to write full-time, and moved to the island of Grand Manan in 2007. On Abducting the Cello, a collection of 53 sonnets, was published in 2004 by The Porcupine's Quill, whose poetry editor Eric Ormsby described Clifford as "a master" of the sonnet who "respects that form but [is] constantly subverting it". The fourth and final volume of The Exile's Papers was a finalist for the 2016 Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize.

In 2013 and 2014, Clifford was an artist in residence at summer Bioblitzes carried out by the New Brunswick Museum in the Grand Lake Protected Natural Area in New Brunswick. His 2017 book Flying the Truck was inspired by these experiences.

Personal life and death Clifford had four children, including the historian Rebecca Clifford. His daughter Annie Clifford was a founding member of the indie folk band The Gertrudes. Late in life he developed Parkinson's disease. He died on Grand Manan on 15 April 2025, at the age of 80.