Joe Rosenblatt was born on December 26, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario.

He was a Canadian poet, writer, and visual artist. The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he grew up in Toronto in the Kensington Market area. He worked as a labourer for the Canadian Pacific Railway and political activist before he encountered the local poetry scene, which quickly drew him in. His first poems were published in the 1960s. He also worked as an editor of Jewish Dialog. He will likely go down in literary history for writing the second book ever published by Coach House Press, “The LSD Leacock,” in 1966. The same year he received a Canada Council grant that allowed him to quit his railway job and write full-time. In 1976, he won the Governor General's award for poetry for his volume of selected poems, “Top Soil.” In 1980, he moved to Vancouver Island and served as Writer-in-Residence and visiting lecturer at the University of Victoria. He travelled extensively for readings in Italy, and several of his books were translated into Italian. His vivid and unique imagination and love of nature inspired his prolific career as a visual artist. His 1986 book “Poetry Hotel” won the B.C. Book Prize for Poetry (now the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). He also published "Winter of the Luna Moth" (1968), "Virgins & vampires" (1975), “Escape from the Glue Factory: a Memoir of a Paranormal Toronto Childhood in the Late Forties" (1985), and "The Bird in the Stillness: Forest Devotionals" (2016). Rosenblatt’s last book of poems and illustrations, "Bite Me: Musings on Monsters and Mayhem," was published just days before his death in 2019.

He was married to Faye Smith (1937-2017). He died on March 11, 2019, in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia.

Ginda Kalujna Rosenblatt was born in 1891. She was a graduate of the Women's Medical Institute of Saint Vladimir University, Kiev. After receiving her degree, Dr. Rosenblatt was conscripted by and served in the Russian Army from 1917-1918, at first as an intern and then as a captain. She was assigned to the 266th Regiment, working at the military hospital in Ostrog, Ukraine, and was later assigned a post closer to the front. The regiment was constricted by economic difficulties, transportation difficulties, and growing unrest among the troops with regard to the Russian military authority.

In late 1917 the 266th regiment decided, independently of the central government, to end their part in the war by demobilizing the troops. Dr. Rosenblatt agreed to this scheme and, along with Dr. Henryk Zamenhof, was responsible for the diagnoses of "heart ailments" among the majority of the members (probably in good health) of the regiment. She herself was diagnosed with a heart ailment and received an honorable discharge in 1918.

Dr. Rosenblatt was reunited with her husband, Abraham Rosenblatt, in Kiev shortly afterward. After the war, she practiced medicine in Briceni and then Lipcani, both in Bessarabia, Romania (now Moldova). Dr. Rosenblatt and her family immigrated to Toronto in May, 1934. Although she fulfilled the requirements for an M.D. degree at the University of Toronto, she chose to devote the rest of her career to social work. Dr. Rosenblatt died in 1986.

A researcher of metabolic diseases, David Rosenblatt completed his medical degree in 1970 at McGill University, where he studied under Charles Scriver. He completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard and MIT before returning at McGill and joining the McGill Group in Medical Genetics in 1975.

The family of Dr. and Mrs. H. Rosen had a summer house on Lake Patrick, Québec in 1973.