Brenda Schmidt grew up on a farm in the Coteau Hills. For the past two decades she has lived in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan, where she works as a writer and visual artist. Her work has been published, performed, shown and broadcast across Canada. Brenda worked as a registered nurse in the mining community of Flin Flon, in northern Manitoba, from 1985-1998. She also has a BA, English, from the University of Waterloo. While living in the north, she has worked as a freelance reporter and photographer for small circulation newspapers, wrote a birding column and volunteered in a recycling centre. Brenda, a naturalist, birdwatcher and active blogger, also specializes in the fine art of road trips.
Brenda Schmidt's latest book, Cantos from Wolverine Creek, was published by Hagios Press in April 2008. Work from it appeared in Listening with the Ear of the Heart: Writers at St. Peter's (St. Peter's Press, 2003), Grain, nthposition, Room of One's Own, The Society, Northern Poetry Review and Forget. A selection from it was shortlisted for the 2004 CBC Literary Awards and another selection was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Awards. Other poems from it were broadcast on CBC's SoundXchange.
Brenda's first collection of poetry, A Haunting Sun (Thistledown Press, 2001), was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry. Her second book, More Than Three Feet of Ice, winner of the 2003 Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry and runner-up for the 2004 John V. Hicks Manuscript Award, was published by Thistledown Press in 2005. Poems from it appeared in Kaleidoscope Journal, Urban Coyote: New Territory, Grain, Other Voices, In Medias Res, Zygote, Room of One's Own and The Harpweaver. For her work in The Harpweaver she was awarded a Harpweaver Prize -- The Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry. Another poem from it called "Ectopic Beats" is part of the Greenboathouse Books Variant project and was published as a limited edition broadsheet by Greenboathouse Books in 2003. Suites of poems from it were aired on CBC's Gallery in 2002 and 2004. In 2004, Globe Theatre's On the Line performed Brenda's short play "Points of Interest," an adaptation of a long poem from this book.
Brenda's paintings have won several awards and have seen solo and group exhibitions in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. She is one of the artists featured in the book Celebrating Saskatchewan Artists (Saskatchewan Arts Alliance, 2006). She is currently at work on a series of watercolours that speak with the poems in her current manuscript. A selection of poems from this manuscript was shortlisted for the 2008 CBC Literary Awards.
