2008 Authors, Moderators and Special Guests
Salvatore Ala
Salvatore Ala’s first book, Clay of the Maker, was published by Mosaic Press (1998). He has also published five broadsides of poems, (Green Alley Press, 1994-2003). Straight Razor and Other Poems was published by Biblioasis in 2004.
Joanne Arnott
Joanne Arnott has been a literary performer and publishing poet since the late 1980’s. She worked for many years as an Unlearning Racism facilitator, and continues to incorporate social justice perspectives and peer-counselling approaches in her work. Wiles of Girlhood won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award (1992) for best first book of poetry. She has since published five additional books, including My Grass Cradle, Ma MacDonald, Breasting the Waves: On Writing & Healing and Steepy Mountain: love poetry. Her most recent work, Mother Time: Poems New & Selected, was published by Ronsdale Press in 2007.
Mike Barnes
Jean Rae Baxter
Jean Rae Baxter holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Toronto and a B.Ed degree from Queen’s. She worked in radio before beginning her career as a secondary school English teacher in Lennox & Addington County, twenty miles west of Kingston. During this time she helped to develop curriculum in liaison with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
During her career in education, Baxter had little free time for her own writing, although she managed to produce a few poems, professional articles, and one-act plays that have been produced in schools and churches.
In 1996, when she returned from the Kingston area to her hometown, Hamilton, Baxter began to write in earnest. An interest in history had already led her into researching Canada’s past. Now she began to write about it, starting with the short story, “Farewell the Mohawk Valley,” which Ronsdale Press included in its anthology, Beginnings: Stories of Canada’s Past (2001). In 2005, she represented Ronsdale Press in Toronto at the Golden Oak Awards, for which Beginnings was shortlisted.
Baxter surprised herself by the discovery that she had a knack for the noir. The first short story she ever wrote, “The Quilt”, received first prize in the Canadian Writer’s Journal’s 2000 Competition. “Mother Wore a Hat” appeared in Lichen Literary Journal and “Depression Glass” in Other Voices. Insomniac Press published “Loss” in its anthology Hard Boiled Love (2003) and “A Wanton Disregard” in Revenge (2004), “The Catnappers” and “O Little Town” appeared in the Hamilton literary journal, Hammered Out. In 2003 and 2004 Baxter received the Arts Hamilton Award for the best story by a Hamilton writer. She has twice been shortlisted for the Canadian Authors’ Association Conference Contest. Seraphim Editions published her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, A Twist of Malice, in 2005.
She has read at venues in Hamilton, Burlington, Dundas, Toronto, Windsor, Cambridge, Kitchener, Port Hope, Cobourg, Kingston, Napanee, Wellington, Belleville and Trenton as well as at Hamilton’s Festival of Friends, Hamilton’s Grit Lit Festival, at the Eden Mills “Fringe” Festival and at Canadian “ex pat” gatherings in China and Romania.
Her young adult historical novel, The Way Lies North, was published by Ronsdale Press in 2007. For her second novel, which was released in April, 2008, she returned to crime. Her literary murder mystery, Looking for Cardenio, centres upon the discovery of an old manuscript that may be Shakespeare’s lost play.
As a member of Arts Hamilton’s Literary Advisory Committee and as one of the organizers of the LiT LiVe Reading Series, she is an active member of Hamilton’s writing community.
Roger Bell
Roger Bell grew up in Port Elgin, Ontario. He taught secondary school English in Simcoe County for 27 years and lives in Tay Township, within dreaming distance of Georgian Bay.
Ross Belot
Ross Belot is a Hamilton Ontario Canada photographer and poet.
Alanna F. Bondar
Alanna F. Bondar latest manuscript, “There are many ways to die while travelling in Peru” explores connections between the frontiers of Northern Ontario and isolated regions of the Peruvian Andes and Amazon. Her recent collection, Dead Sparrow Chronicles tells the story of a woman’s geopsychic journey into beauty, compassion, and abandonment. Alanna Bondar won the Canadian Heritage Award for poetry (1990) and has continued exploring her Lithuanian heritage in Our Grandmothers, Ourselves (Raincoast, 1999). Her poetry has appeared Canadian and American literary journals including Grain, QAE, CV2, Dandelion, The Cormorant, TickleAce, Rampike, The New Quarterly, Qwerty, Public Works, and Wayzgoose. She received her Ph.D. from Memorial University of Newfoundland and publishes articles on ecocriticism and Canadian ecological literature. Bondar works as a professor of English and Creative Writing at Algoma University College (Laurentian University) Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
Di Brandt
Di Brandt has published numerous collections of poetry, including Questions I Asked My Mother; Agnes in the sky; Jerusalem, Beloved; and Now You Care; and several books of poetic prose, including Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies for Writing Across Centuries, and So this is the World & here I am In It. She has been nominated for and received numerous literary awards, including The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 1987, Canadian Authors Association National Poetry Award, 1995, and the National Magazine Award for Poetry, 1995. She was on the Commonwealth Poetry Prize short list in 1988 and was a finalist for Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1987 and again in 1995. Her writing has been published by presses such as Turnstone, Mercury and Wilfrid Laurier. Her poetry has been adapted for television, video, film, art installation, music and dance. She holds a prestigious Canada Research Chair in English and Creative Writing at Brandon University, Canada. Her opera with composer Jana Skarecky of Toronto, Emily, The Way You Are, about the life and work of Emily Carr premiered at the McMichael Gallery in Ontario.
John Robert Colombo
John Robert Colombo wrote, compiled, and translated more than 190 books between 1960 and 2006. In addition, during the same period, he edited or co-wrote about the same number of books, which appeared under the names of other Canadians, for Toronto-based publishers. Among his Ontario-based books are Ghost Stories of Ontario, Mysteries of Ontario, Haunted Toronto, and The Toronto Puzzle Book.
Christopher Paul Curtis
Christopher Paul Curtis won his third Coretta Scott King Award for his most recent children’s book, Elijah of Buxton, (Scholastic Canada), his YA novel about a free-born child in an Ontario farming community of escaped slaves. The book also received a Newbery Honor at the American Library Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Children’s Literature Award in 2007.
Michael Duben (moderator)
In September 2004, Michael E. Duben became General Manager of Client Services for the City of Windsor. As such he is one of five General Managers working with CAO/City Manager John Skorobohacz as a team on corporate initiatives consistent with the directions of City Council. Mr. Duben's areas of responsibility include parks and recreation, hospitality services including Willistead Manor and Mackenzie Hall, the Convention and Visitor's Bureau, facilities management, customer services and culture and heritage.
A Montreal native, Mr. Duben received his B.A. from McGill University in 1989. He came to Windsor to attend the University of Windsor Law School; he received his LL.B. in 1992 and practiced law in Windsor for several years. A graduate of Leadership Detroit, Mr. Duben's community involvement has included President of the Windsor-St. Clair Rotary Club, director of the City Centre Business Association of Windsor, director of the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre, and director of the Art Gallery of Windsor.
David French
David French is a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright born in Coley's Point, Newfoundland , January 18, 1939. Although he moved from Newfoundland to Toronto with his family when he was six, the province and its people are a significant part of his works, especially his semi-autobiographical "Mercer plays", which track the history of a Newfoundland family living in Toronto through three generations: Leaving Home (1972), Of the Fields, Lately (1973), Salt-Water Moon (1984), 1949 (1989) and Soldier's Heart (2002). Other plays include: One Crack Out (1975); Canadian English translations of Chekhov's The Seagull (1977) and Strindberg's Miss Julie (2005); The Riddle of the World (1981); and a murder-mystery, The Silver Dagger (Canadian Stage 1993). He was nominated for the Chalmers Award five times, and won it for Of the Fields, Lately. He has won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Salt-Water Moon, and was nominated for a Governor General's Award for Salt-Water Moon. A revival of what is now a "classic" Canadian play, Leaving Home, by Soulpepper Theatre Company in 2006 was critically acclaimed for its enduring relevance. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and one of the first inductees into the Newfoundland Arts Hall of Honour.
Karolyn Smardz Frost
Karolyn Smardz Frost is a Toronto-born archaeologist and historian whose 1985 excavation of the Thornton and Lucie Blackburn site made history. I've Got a Home in Glory Land is the fruit of more than twenty years of historical detective work into this fugitive slave couple's dramatic escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad, and was the winner of a Governor General''s Literary Award in 2007. Smardz Frost divides her time between her Collingwood, Ontario, home and an oceanfront cottage on Nova Scotia's South Shore.
C.H. "Marty" Gervais
Marty Gervais, in addition to being a writer, is the founder and part owner of Black Moss Press. He is also Resident Writing Professional at the University of Windsor, where he teaches courses in editing, publishing, and creative writing. He writes a regular column, My Town, for the Windsor Star. In 1998, he won the Harbourfront Festival Prize for contributions to Canadian letters and emerging writers. His recent book of poems is Wait for Me, 2006.
Susan Gold
Susan Gold is an artist and educator in Windsor, Ontario. Her interest in the book form is of the book as sculptural and as time-based object, the book as a meeting place for text and image, the book as collage, the book as collection. The book form is a flexible arena for the artist's explorations and representations.
Percy Hatfield (moderator)
Before running for elected office, Councillor Percy Hatfield was the Municipal Affairs Reporter for CBC Television in Windsor. He had worked for the CBC as a radio and television journalist for more than thirty years and used to host a popular segment "Percy's Political Panel."
Stephen Henighan
Stephen Henighan is a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Guelph. His most recent books are A Grave in the Air (Thistledown 2007), a collection of short stories, and the forthcoming book of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (Biblioasis 2008).
David Hickey
David Hickey was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for his first collection of poetry, In the Lights of a Midnight Plow (Biblioasis, 2006). He also took second place in the Petra Kenney Poetry Competition.
Laurence Hutchman
Laurence Hutchman was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1948. He obtained his BA in English at the University of Western Ontario, his MA at Concordia University, and his Ph.D at the Université de Montréal. He has taught at a number of universities including Concordia University, the University of Alberta, The University of Western Ontario, and The Université de Moncton. Hutchman was President of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick from 2000-2002. He has given many readings and workshops in Canada, the United States, China, Ireland and Bulgaria. Hutchman lives with his wife, Mary, in Edmundston. They have two children.
Karl Jirgens (moderator)
Karl Jirgens’ fictional works have been anthologized by Coach House Press, Black Moss Press, and Mercury Press. His Theatre/Performance works have been presented nationally and internationally, including at the Ultimatum Fest in Montreal and at the INTER-Festival in Quebec City. He currently serves as the Department Head for English Language, Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. He is the editor-in-chief of Rampike Magazine.
Ricardo Keens-Douglas
Suzanne Konyha
Suzanne Konyha is a Windsor-based visual artist who has been exhibiting her work across Ontario for well over a decade. Her sculpture entitled "Blue Rhapsody" was part of the 2005 CarTunes on Parade sculpture displays in Windsor and Detroit. Suzanne has also worked closely with children in southwestern Ontario schools, using visual arts as a medium to enhance the curriculum and classroom participation, as part of the Learning Through The Arts initiative. Suzanne will present a hands-on workshop in bookmaking for children in the AGW studio.
John B. Lee
John B. Lee is Canada's most prolific poet. He is a three-time recipient of the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award, the Eric Hill Award of Excellence in Poetry and has won another 60 prestigious national and international awards for his writing.
Linda Leith
Linda Leith is a Montreal novelist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She wrote her "excellent first novel" (TLS), Birds of Passage, during two years in Budapest in the early 1990s. Her second, The Tragedy Queen, published in 1995, was a "Canadians Recommend" title for Canada Reads in 2003 and was translated into French by Agnès Guitard as Un Amour de Salomé, which won the 2003 Governor General's Award. Her non-fiction publications include Introducing Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes (forthcoming in French in fall 2008) and Marrying Hungary, a memoir commissioned for publication in French as Epouser la Hongrie (translation by Aline Apostolska, Leméac 2003), translated into Serbian by Aleksandra Mancic (2004); a full-length version will appear in English in fall 2008. The Desert Lake (2007) is a novel set in northwestern China. Leith founded and directs the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival.
Alistair MacLeod
Alistair MacLeod has long been recognized as one of Canada's greatest short story writers, based on his two collections, Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). His first novel, No Great Mischief (1999) won the Canadian Booksellers Association Library Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Lannan Literary Award. It has been translated into many languages.
Mary Jane Maffini
Mary Jane Maffini is the author of three mystery series: The Camilla MacPhee mysteries, the Fiona Silk books, and the Charlotte Adams mysteries. She was the Canadian Guest of Honour at “Bloody Words” in Toronto, at which she won the Derrick Murdoch award from Crime Writers of Canada. In 2001, she won the Arthur Ellis Award for best short story. The Dead Don't Get Out Much was nominated for a Barry Award for Best Paperback Original. Toronto-based Thump Entertainment has optioned the Camilla MacPhee characters. Her latest book is Too Hot to Handle, RendeVous Press, 2007
Randall Maggs
Randall Maggs is the author of Timely Departures (poetry, 1994), and co-editor of two anthologies pairing Newfoundland and Canadian poems with those of Ireland. He is artistic director of Newfoundland’s March Hare festival of music and literature, and teaches literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University. His new book is Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (Brick Books, 2008)
Patricia Neely McCurdy
Patricia Neely McCurdy is a retired Professor and founder of the Interior Design Program at St. Clair College, Windsor. Patricia is the author of the thesis: The Identification of Afro-American Architectural Characteristics in Housing in Raleigh Township and Southwestern Ontario in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. She is author of the book: The Houses of Buxton: a legacy of African influences in Architecture.
Susan McMaster
Susan McMaster was born in Toronto and raised in Ottawa along with five younger siblings in a Quaker family. As a young woman, she founded the feminist magazine Branching Out with a group of wild Edmonton women (after moving there for Ian's grad studies for 4 years). She started the group First Draft with her brother Andrew in Ottawa, and created many word music performances and projects.
Eugene McNamara
Eugene McNamara is a profound voice in Canadian Literature. A native of Chicago, he emigrated to Canada in 1959. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Windsor. Joyce Carol Oates described his short stories thus: "The short stories of Eugene McNamara are warmly, often deeply engaging; they are wry, bittersweet and wise."
Irene Moore (moderator)
Irene Moore is Manager of Continuing Education at St. Clair College. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Windsor, an M.A. in English from Queen's University, and a B.Ed. from the University of Western Ontario. In her spare time, Ms. Moore enjoys a wide array of community activities including board and committee roles with the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, the Windsor and District Black Coalition, the Northstar Cultural Community Centre, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Leadership Windsor/Essex, and BookFestWindsor.
Karen Mulhallen
Karen Mulhallen is a writer, editor and professor. She teaches in the English department at Ryerson Polytechnic University and is editor for Descant Magazine, which publishes new and established contemporary writers and visual artists around the world. Mulhallen has published 8 books including 3 anthologies and a travel-fiction memoir.
Mary Ann Mulhern
Mary Ann Mulhern is a Windsor teacher and poet. The Red Dress and Touch the Dead were published by Black Moss Press. Touch the Dead was short-listed for the 2007 Acorn Plantos award. Her third book of poetry, When Angels Weep was published April 2008. Ten of these poems were published in the January 2008 edition of Descant. When Angels Weep is based on the Father Charles Sylvestre priest pedophile case in wbich he pleaded guilty to forty-seven counts of child sexual abuse. The lanch was held at the University of Windsor, April 10, 2008. There was intense media coverage which drew almost 400 people. When Angels Weep is already in second printing.
Stephen Pender (moderator)
Dr. Stephen Pender, currently director of the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, is a minor artist of the late twentieth century. He is a specialist in the poetry and prose of early modern Britain, intellectual history, and the history of medicine. His current projects include work on the relationship between rhetoric and medicine in early modern England, on medical thought in contemporary historiography, and on early modern ethics. He lives in Windsoria.
M. Nourbese Philip
M. Nourbese Philip is a poet, novelist, essayist and playwright who lives in Toronto. Her books of poetry include, Thorns, Salmon Courage, She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, and Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (a poem in prose and poetry). Her first novel Harriet's Daughter (1988, Heinemann, England & Women's Press, Canada), was a finalist in the 1989 Canadian Library Association Prize for Children's Literature; the Max and Greta Abel Award for Multicultural Literature, l990, and the Toronto Book Awards, 1990. In 1981 her poetry was awarded a Pushcart Prize (USA) and in 1988 She Tries Her Tongue... was awarded the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba) for poetry. She was also awarded the Tradewinds Collective Prize (Trindidad and Tobago) in 1988 for both poetry and short fiction. M. Nourbese Philip was made a Guggenheim Fellow (USA, 1990) in poetry, and became a Macdowell Fellow (USA, 1991). In 2005 she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio) fellowsip in poetry. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.A., and her poetry and prose have been extensively anthologized. Her most recent collections of essays include A Genealogy of Resistance; and Frontiers: Essays and Writings in Racism and Culture, and Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel. Her essay "Black (W)holes” was a finalist in the 1999 Canadian Magazine Awards. M. Nourbese Philip is also a successful playwright. Her plays include The Redemption of Al Bumen, and Coups and Calypsos for which she was a 1999 Dora Award finalist.
Marilyn Gear Pilling
Marilyn Gear Pilling lives in Hamilton and grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, but her roots are in Huron County. Pilling's short fiction and poetry have won and been shortlisted for national awards and her poetry has been broadcast on CBC radio.
Nino Ricci
Nino Ricci's most recent novel, Testament, is available in Canada with Anchor Books, a division of Doubleday Canada, and in the U.S. with Houghton Mifflin, as a Mariner Paperback. Testament was the co-winner of the Trillium Award as well as being shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Prize, Canada and Caribbean Region. Nino Ricci is also the author of the trilogy novels Lives of the Saints, In A Glass House, and Where She Has Gone, adapted into a miniseries starring Sophia Loren, Nick Mancuso, Fab Fillipo, Jessica Paré, and Kris Kristofferson. Ricci was the recent winner of the Alistair MacLeod Award for Literary Achievement.
Diane Schoemperlen
Diane Schoemperlen is the author of Forms of Devotion, which won the 1998 Governor General's Award for Fiction; In the Language of Love, which was chosen by Toronto Star critic Philip Marchand as one of the year's best novels; Our Lady of the Lost and Found, and At a Loss For Words, both of which were national bestsellers. Diane received the Marian Engel Award in 2008 from the Writers' Trust of Canada, an honour bestowed to a woman writer for her body of work. She has also written six short story collections, including The Man of My Dreams, which was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Fiction and a Trillium Book Award. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, with her son.
Russell Smith
Russell Smith was born in South Africa and raised in Halifax, the son of a university professor and a teacher. He began his career as a writer in Toronto after studying at universities in France and Canada. His first novel, How Insensitive, was published in 1994 and nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, and became a bestseller in Canada. He is also the author of the novel Noise, the award winning story collection Young Men, and an illustrated adult fable, The Princess and the Whiskheads. In 2003 he published a book of pornographic fiction under the pseudonym "Diane Savage". That novella, Diana: A Diary In The Second Person has just been reprinted, with a new introduction by the author, under Russell Smith's name. A popular and controversial weekly columnist with The Globe and Mail, Russell Smith's articles on a variety of subjects have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Details, Travel and Leisure, Toronto Life, EnRoute, Toro and elsewhere.
Steven Ross Smith
Steven Ross Smith has published eleven books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including fluttertongue book 3: disarray, which won the Book of the Year Award at the Saskatchewan Books Awards. His other titles include Fluttertongue book 2: The Book Of Emmett and Lures, Celebrating Saskatchewan Artists, Ballet of Speech Organs: Bob Cobbing on Bob Cobbing Interviewed by Steven Ross Smith, and Fluttertongue 4: Adagio for Pressured Surround (shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry). Smith’s writing has been published by presses such as Underwhich, NeWest, Turnstone, Mercury, Wolsak & Wynn among others. His writing has appeared on several audiocassette and CD collections. He has performed his work and/or been published in England, Holland, Russia, Portugal, the USA, and in Canada. His work has appeared more than eighty times in periodicals. He has written and performed for radio, and has given about two hundred readings from his own work. He has recently moved from Saskatoon to Banff where he is the Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre.
Mary Swan
Mary Swan is the winner of the 2001 O. Henry Award for short fiction and is the author of the collection The Deep and Other Stories (Random House). Her work has appeared in several Canadian literary magazines, including The Malahat Review, the Ontario Review, and Best Canadian Stories, as well as American publications such as Harper’s. Her new book is The Boys in the Trees, published by Henry Holt & Company (2008). Mary Swan lives with her husband and daughter near Toronto.
Paul Vasey
Paul Vasey, now retired from the CBC, was host of CBC radio's Windsor morning show, and host of the morning show in Victoria, BC. He is an award-winning journalist who spent the early part of his career working at newspapers including the Hamilton Spectator and the Windsor Star. Paul has written two novels, Sufferer Kind (1978) and It's Only a Broken Heart (2000), a novella, Into Thin Air (1994), a book of short stories, Failure of Love (1991) as well as an acclaimed work of non-fiction, Kids in the Jail (1995). His latest novel is The Last Labour of the Heart (2005), published by Black Moss Press.
Eric Walters
Eric Walters began writing as a way to entice his grade 5 students into becoming more interested in reading and writing. Each day he would read to his students the story he was writing, which was set in their school: this book, Stand Your Ground, became Eric's first published novel. Since that first creation Eric has published over fifty best-selling novels. His novels have won more than thirty awards, and have been translated into several languages including French, Japanese, Dutch, Chinese and German. Eric writes in a variety of genres including historical/fiction, contemporary, humour, first chapter books, a picture book, sports, and mystery, but often his stories incorporate themes that reflect his background in education and social work and his commitment to humanitarian and social justice issues. His recent novel (2008) is Pole, Penguin Group Canada.
John Wing Jr.
John Wing is the number one comedy export of Sarnia, Ontario and one of Canada's greatest gifts to the comedy industry. Now living in Los Angeles, John has been a professional stand-up for over two decades and has performed on network television well over one hundred times including six appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno as well as A & E's An Evening At The Improv and ABC's Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. In Canada, John has earned a Gemini Nomination for a previous Just For Laughs taping and recorded two hour-long specials for CTV. Also an accomplished writer, he has written for the syndicated Bob & Tom Morning Show, The Barbra Streisand Millenium concert and his own radio series Man, Woman and Child for CBC Radio. Mr. Wing's musings have also been captured in poetry with three published collections including his most recent None OF This Is Probably True.
Jeremy Worth
Jeremy Worth received his Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2004, and since 2006 has been a member of the department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Windsor. In 2007-2008 he is teaching a variety of courses, including French Literary Theory, Realism & Naturalism and French Romanticism. His research interests include French Naturalism, Émile Zola and theories of identity and subjectivity, and over the past decade he has published articles and given conference papers in Canada, the USA, the United Kingdom and France. A native of Watford, England, Jeremy Worth emigrated to Canada in 1992.