Margoshes, Dave (1941-)

Dave Margoshes.

Don Healy (Regina Leader-Post)

Dave Margoshes is a full-time writer and poet living in Regina. He was born in the United States, and attended school in New York City and rural New Jersey. He received a BA from the University of Iowa and later returned to its well-known Writers’ Workshop for a MFA. Margoshes worked for various newspapers in the USA before moving to Canada in the early 1970s. Here he worked for newspapers in Vancouver and Calgary, and taught journalism at Mount Royal College and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. In 1986, he moved to Saskatchewan and began freelance writing. His work has been published in Canadian and American magazines, broadcast on CBC, and included five times in Best Canadian Stories. He was the writer-in-residence in Winnipeg in 1995–96, and Saskatoon in 2001–02. He still works occasionally as a freelance journalist, a teacher of journalism, an editor, and a leader at creative writing workshops, including the Sage Hill Writing Experience.

Margoshes is the author of novels: Drowning Man and I’m Frankie Sterne; and of collections of poetry: Purity of Absence, Northwest Passages, and Walking at Brighton. Other books include the story collections Fables of Creation, Long Distance Calls, Nine Lives, and Small Regrets. He is also the author of Tommy Douglas: Building the New Society, a biography of the Saskatchewan socialist Premier, and of a junior high school resource book, Discover Canada: Saskatchewan, which is used in schools in Canada and the USA.

Margoshes’ work in fiction, poetry and nonfiction has been recognized with numerous awards and honours including: John V. Hicks Award (Saskatchewan Writers Guild), 2001; Stephen Leacock Poetry Award, 1996; co-winner, Prairie Fire Short Story Contest, 1996; Saskatchewan Writers Guild Literary Award for Fiction, 1994; Saskatchewan Writers Guild Literary Award for Fiction Manuscript, 1990; Saskatchewan Writers Guild Literary Award for Non-fiction, 1990. He helped to organize the Saskatchewan Book Awards and served as their first chairman; for this, he received the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Volunteer Award in 2000.