McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Kearns, Lionel, 1937-
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1937-
History
Lionel Kearns was born on February 16, 1937, in Nelson, British Columbia.
He is a Canadian poet and teacher. He attended the University of British Columbia and, in 1964, he moved to England to study Structural Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. After a year of research on the West Indian island of Trinidad, he returned to Vancouver to join the English Department at the recently opened Simon Fraser University, where he taught until 1986. He spent 1981-1982 as Writer-in-Residence at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Since his first publication in 1959, Kearns’ poems, stories, and essays have continued to appear in magazines and anthologies, both Canadian and international. His work ranges from traditional page-bound pieces to more experimental and dynamic screen-based forms, e.g., "By the light of the silvery McLune: media parables, poems, signs, gestures, and other assaults on the interface" (1968), "Practicing up to be human" (1978), and "Convergences" (1984).
He continues to write and develop his art in Vancouver, where he lives with his wife Gerri Sinclair.