Chris Pannell has lived in Hamilton since 1988. He has published six previous books of poetry; A Nervous City (2013) won the Kerry Schooley Book Award from the Hamilton Arts Council. His last book, Love, Despite the Ache (2016), won Poetry Book of the Year from HAC. Drive (released in 2009) won the People’s Poetry Award the following year. Pannell is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets, which won the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Award in 1997.

He is a former DARTS bus driver, a former technical writer, and has hosted and helped run the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton for twenty years. Between 2015 and 2017 he edited the US academic journal The Oxfordian, an annual publication of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, which encourages discussion of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. From 1993 to 2005 he ran the new writing workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-length anthologies for the group.