Rhea Tregebov is the author of fiction, poetry and children’s picture books. Her second novel, Rue des Rosiers, released in May 2019, was short-listed for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Knife Sharpener’s Bell (2009), a Globe and Mail Jim Bartley Top 5 book, won the J.I. Segal Award and was shortlisted for the Kobzar Award. Tregebov is also the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently All Souls’ (Véhicule Press 2012). Her poems have earned the Pat Lowther Award, Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award. She has published five popular children’s picture books, among them the Sasha series, illustrated by Hélène Desputeaux, creator of the Caillou television series. Tregebov has edited numerous anthologies, including Arguing with the Storm, an anthology of stories by women writers which she co-translated from the Yiddish. She is currently working on an eighth collection of poetry.

Tregebov was born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, where she received her undergraduate education at the University of Manitoba. She did graduate work in literature at Cornell and Boston Universities, receiving her MA from BU in 1978. After working in Toronto for many years as a freelance author and editor, she moved to Vancouver in 2004 to take up a position in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, where she taught workshops in poetry, translation, children’s literature and fiction. In June 2017, she retired from teaching at UBC; she now holds the position of Associate Professor Emerita. In June 2021, she became the Chair of The Writers Union of Canada.

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