Todd Swift is one of the most exciting and eclectic young writers to emerge in Canada in the late 90s. Over the last decade he has continuously explored new genres and themes, writing in a variety of styles, including work for television, film, radio, theatre, CD, spoken word and the printed page. He has also become recognized as one of North America's leading poetry activists and is involved internationally in the promotion of performance poets, through his various cabaret events and other related projects. As performer, writer, impresario and editor, (of the significant anthologies Map-Makers' Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland and Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poets), he has defined a new kind of cosmopolitan panache for the idea of the poet as key figure at the start of a new millennium.

Todd Swift was born in Montreal on Good Friday, 1966. He grew up in St. Lambert and Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During his college years he was a top-ranked international debater. After graduating, he wrote over sixty hours of TV, mainly with Thor Bishopric, for HBO, Fox, Paramount and Hanna-Barbera, among others. He is one of the founders of the current poetry cabaret scene in Montreal, and was the emcee of Vox Hunt Slam. As a member of the electronic spoken word group Swifty Lazarus, with Tom Walsh, he has released a CD, The Envelope, Please, from Wired On Words, and has appeared on ABC, BBC and CBC radio. From 1998-2001 Swift was Visiting Lecturer at Budapest University (ELTE) in the American Studies Department, and created several courses on film and poetry. His writing has appeared widely, in such periodicals as The National Post, The Literary Review of Canada, enRoute, The Dubliner, Gargoyle and Cordite. He is the co-editor of several significant anthologies, including Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. Swift's Budavox: poems 1990-1999 was chosen by Geist as one of the five best Canadian books of 1999. He is a Contributing Editor for Matrix, and Poetry Editor of the online magazine Nthposition.com. He currently lives in London, England.

Todd Swift's profile page

"Swift's poems move between the familiar and exotic, from the meditative through the speculative. His poetic language too is on the move, from the crisp tentativeness of Elizabeth Bishop to the outer suburbs of Wallace Stevens and even, here and there, Ginsberg. The intimate is always threatened: reality is challenged by its myths. These poems show a young man exploring the world before him with intelligence, grace, even a certain bravado. They make a very auspicious first collection." -- George Szirtes (British poet, author of Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1996) "Swift writes like something still matters, but he doesn't know what. Dark and dangerous, Swift offers us a requiem for the century. Budavox is ... one of the five best and darkest works of 1999. -- Hal Niedzviecki, Geist