Tom Dawe has been a high-school teacher, English professor, visual artist, editor, writer, and poet. He has published seventeen volumes of work, which include poetry, folklore, and children’s literature. His latest works include Where Genesis Begins (Breakwater, 2009), winner of the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, and Moocher in the Lun (Flanker Press, 2010), winner of the 2010 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards–Bruneau Family Children’s/Young Adult Literature Award.
In the 1970s, during the “Newfoundland Renaissance,” he was one of the founders of Breakwater Books, a founding editor of TickleAce, and prose editor of the Livyere, a folklore journal. In 2002, Martina Seifert’s comprehensive study, Rewriting Newfoundland Mythology: The Works of Tom Dawe, was published in Germany and in Cambridge, MA.
Tom Dawe is the recipient of many awards and honours. In 2007, he was awarded a lifetime membership for the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador and was elected to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour. In 2010, he was named St. John’s Poet Laureate. In 2012, he was named a member to the Order of Canada and also to the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador.