Canada has produced her urban poets. Archibald Lampman gave us a glimpse of a dystopian future in his nineteenth century poem The City of the End of Things. Dennis Lee immortalized Toronto in his masterful Civil Elegies. And so, Windsor's Poet Laureate Marty Gervais put out the call and the muses answered and the city came alive. The past must be grateful to be remembered well, and the future beholden to those who preserve the present. In Because We Have Lived Here the reader might join these poets in honouring the five towns on the south shore of the Detroit River as it flows from Lake St.Clair to Lake Erie, or as we read from Sandwich through Riverside, the compass of our consciousness traveling west by northwest and then south to the newest environs of the vibrant border city of Windsor, the jewel of Southwestern Ontario.

In 2005 John B. Lee was inducted as Poet Laureate of Brantford in perpetuity. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County (2011-14) and in 2015 Honourary Poet Laureate of Norfolk County for life and in 2017 he received a Canada 150 Medal from the Federal Government of Canada for “his outstanding contribution to literary development both at home and abroad.” A recipient of over eighty prestigious international awards for his writing, he is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People’s Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of Windsor). He has well-over seventy books published to date and is the editor of seven anthologies including two best-selling works: That Sign of Perfection: poems and stories on the game of hockey; and Smaller Than God: words of spiritual longing. His work has appeared internationally in over 500 publications, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. He has read his work in nations all over the world including South Africa, France, Korea, Cuba, Canada and the United States. He has received letters of praise from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Australian Poet, Les Murray, and Senator Romeo Dallaire. Called “the greatest living poet in English,” by poet George Whipple, he lives in Port Dover, Ontario where he works as a full time author.

John B. Lee's profile page