1958 - 2015
Poet and editor Elise Partridge was educated at Harvard University, Boston University, Cambridge University, and the University of British Columbia. She is the author of the poetry collections Fielder’s Choice (2002) and Chameleon Hours (2008), which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award. Her poems have also been featured on Garrison Keillor’s NPR program The Writer’s Almanac.
Partridge’s poems, in the words of critic Stephen Burt, “pursue a careful thinker’s yearning for abandon.” In an interview with the Canadian literary journal The Walrus, Partridge spoke of her experience with cancer and the ways it shaped her second collection, Chameleon Hours: “Many of the poems I suppose ask implicit questions about fullness of life or lives somehow thwarted, diminished, ended too early—about how we spend our time, treat our fellow human beings or our environment.” As Burt observed, “Attentive to fact, to what she sees and knows, Partridge nonetheless makes space for what is wild, outside and within us—for the fears and the blanks of chemotherapy, for sharp variations within (and without) frames of metre and rhyme, and for the welcome consistencies of married love.”
Partridge has served as poet-in-residence for Arc magazine and was a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Her husband, Stephen Partridge, is a professor of medieval literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.