In the fall of 1998, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, hosted a symposium on the life and work of Pulitzer prize-winning writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). This book collects 25 of the essays that were presented at the conference, as well as over 40 black and white reproductions of photographs relating to Bishop’s life.

Contributors include: Crystal Bacon, Marian Bannerman, Sandra Barry, Brian Bartlett, Neil Besner, Theodore Colson, Barbara Comins, Gwen Davies, Jeffery Donaldson, Patricia Dwyer, Lilian Falk, Andre Furlani, Gary Fountain, Glen Robert Gill, Lorrie Goldensohn, Michael Happy, Kathleen Johnson, Ross Leckie, Elizabeth McKim, Laura Jehn Menides, Sara Meyer, Roger Moore, Brian Robinson, Camille Roman, Peter Sanger and Anne Stevenson.

Sandra Barry is a poet, independent scholar, and freelance editor. She is co-founder and past president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. She is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: An Archival Guide to Her Life in Nova Scotia and is co-editor of Divisions of the Heart: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Memory and Place. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Sandra Barry's profile page

Gwendolyn Davies is an emerita professor of English and dean of graduate studies at the University of New Brunswick. She has published or edited six books and over sixty articles and book chapters on pre-1940 Atlantic literature and on the history of the book in Canada. Books include Studies in Maritime Literary History and a scholarly edition of Thomas McCulloch’s The Mephibosheth Stepsure Letters.

Gwendolyn Davies' profile page

Raised in Ontario, Peter Sanger (1943) was born in Worcestershire, England, and was for twenty-six years a professor at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro. An editor of The Antigonish Review, Sanger also edited John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations (1995). He founded the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. His books on poetry include SeaRun: Notes on John Thompson's "Stilt Jack" (1986) and "Her kindled shadow . . .": An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram (2001, 2002). A collection of essays, Spar: Words in Place, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2002.

Peter Sanger's profile page

“Divisions of the Heart is an essential addition to the expanding library of Bishop criticism.” George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Sunday Herald