Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X. I like anniversaries.... Immediately I thought of many decades before: 1955, the last year as mindblowing and strange. This, in turn, led me to play with the experiment idea, the X-Files aspect: I wanted poems and prose both of our moment, and yet imbued with the same sense of retro-kitsch that popularly defines the 50s--works about the future, robots, space travel, technology, and sci-fi terror. I wanted freshness in terms of subject matter and expression, disregard for diction and social mores, a fascination with the new, the weird, and the innovative, just for the hell of it--the best writers, Canadian and otherwise, intent on capturing the imagination, unconcerned by conventional literary success, making a difference. Future Welcome is, in a nutshell, "ultra-new writing for the 21st century!" with all the queer, geeky, subversive brio such a movie-poster phrase, retrofitted for our purposes, suggests. -Todd Swift, from the Introduction

Todd Swift was born in Montreal on Good Friday, 1966. He grew up in St. Lambert and Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During his college years he was a top-ranked international debater. After graduating, he wrote over sixty hours of TV, mainly with Thor Bishopric, for HBO, Fox, Paramount and Hanna-Barbera, among others. He is one of the founders of the current poetry cabaret scene in Montreal, and was the emcee of Vox Hunt Slam. As a member of the electronic spoken word group Swifty Lazarus, with Tom Walsh, he has released a CD, The Envelope, Please, from Wired On Words, and has appeared on ABC, BBC and CBC radio. From 1998-2001 Swift was Visiting Lecturer at Budapest University (ELTE) in the American Studies Department, and created several courses on film and poetry. His writing has appeared widely, in such periodicals as The National Post, The Literary Review of Canada, enRoute, The Dubliner, Gargoyle and Cordite. He is the co-editor of several significant anthologies, including Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. Swift's Budavox: poems 1990-1999 was chosen by Geist as one of the five best Canadian books of 1999. He is a Contributing Editor for Matrix, and Poetry Editor of the online magazine Nthposition.com. He currently lives in London, England.

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