In 1973, Hildi Froese Tiessen published the first academic essay about Rudy Wiebe's fiction (included in this volume). Since then, in scholarly essays and talks, she has examined with great insight the literary careers of Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Julia Kasdorf, Sandra Birdsell, and David Waltner-Toews, as well as key origin figures like Arnold Dyck and Al Reimer. Dr. Froese Tiessen’s widely admired essays include several (among the first of their kind) which situate Mennonite literature in relation to postmodernism, as well as investigations of the sometimes disconcerting ethnic and theological assumptions about Mennonite artistic practice. The essays in On Mennonite/s Writing are the first solo collection of Dr. Tiessen’s writings, and she has written a major new piece especially for this publication.

Dr. Hildi Froese Tiessen is one of the foremost scholars of Mennonite literature today. Raised in Manitoba, Hildi Froese Tiessen earned a BA at the University of Winnipeg and an MA and PhD at the University of Alberta. She taught English and Peace & Conflict Studies (1987-2012) at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, where she also served as academic dean. She is the editor of Liars and Rascals (1989), an anthology of short fiction by Mennonite authors and, with Paul Tiessen, After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Letters to Ephraim Weber (2006).

Hildi Froese Tiessen's profile page

Robert Zacharias is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of English at York University in Toronto, where his research interests include Canadian literature, Mennonite writing, and the spatial politics of literary study. His publications include Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism (Penn State UP), shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism, and Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature (U Manitoba P); and, as editor, In Search of a Mennonite Imagination: Key Texts in Mennonite Literary Criticism (Canadian Mennonite UP); After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (Penn State UP); and, with Smaro Kamboureli, Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (Wilfrid Laurier UP). 

Robert Zacharias' profile page

"Hildi Froese Tiessen has played an essential role in the remarkable flowering of Mennonite/s writing over what is now half a century. The publication of her essays reveals anew the great generosity, critical acumen, and encyclopedic knowledge that Tiessen has offered to the Mennonite writing community." —Jeff Gundy