Sward, Robert, 1933-2022

Robert Stuart Sward was born on June 23, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois.

He was an American and Canadian poet, novelist, and educator. He graduated from the University of Illinois (B.A.) and the University of Iowa (M.A.). He was appointed Visiting Poet at the University of Victoria, Department of Creative Writing, in 1969, where he first experimented with computer-generated poetry and served on the editorial board of Epoch. He also taught at Cornell University (1964-1965), the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Victoria, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1970, he founded the Soft Press publishing company in Victoria. In the 1980s, he worked for the CBC, where he interviewed and produced 60-minute radio features on Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, John Robert Colombo, Al Purdy, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and other leading Canadian figures. Sward also worked as a journalist, book reviewer, and feature writer for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Financial Times in Toronto while living on the Toronto Islands (1979-1985). He received a Canada Council grant to research and write “The Toronto Islands” (1983), a best-selling illustrated history of a unique community from prehistoric times to the present. A member of the League of Canadian Poets since 1975, Sward has toured Canada with each of his new books and reviewed and helped bring noted Canadian writers to the U.S. A Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. Sward is the author of 30 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including "Uncle Dog & Other Poems" (1962), "Kissing the Dancer" (1964), "Poems: New and Selected, 1957-1976", the novel "Jurassic Shales" (1975), "Poet Santa Cruz" (1985), "Three Dogs and a Parrot" (2001) and "God is in the Cracks, A Narrative in Voices" (2006). He has been published widely in numerous anthologies and traditional literary magazines, such as The New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, and The Hudson Review. In 2016, Sward was named Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, 2016–2018.

He died on February 21, 2022, in Santa Cruz, California.