Allan Safarik was born in Vancouver and raised in a commercial fishing family on Vancouver Heights in North Burnaby where he spent much of his childhood exploring the waterfront when he wasn't playing soccer in East End parks. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, is an editor and was a co-founder of Blackfish Press in British Columbia. In 1986, he edited the award winning anthology Vancouver Poetry. Safarik, a long time resident of White Rock, BC, currently resides in Dundurn, Saskatchewan and teaches Imaginative Writing at St. Peter's College in Muenster. Safarik won the 2003 John V. Hicks Manuscript Award for Literary Non-Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry (in the name of Anne Szumigalski) for When Light Falls from the Sun Hagios Press. He has a B.A. in English from Simon Fraser University. His recent books include Yellowgrass (Hagios, 2008) and The Day is a Cold Grey Stone (Hagios 2010).