Carl Watts is from Hamilton, Ontario. He holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University, where he wrote a dissertation about evolving conceptions of nationalism and ethnicity in twentieth-century Canadian fiction written in English. He has taught literature at Queen’s, Royal Military College, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in mainland China. His articles, book reviews, and poems have appeared in various Canadian, American, and British journals. He has published two poetry chapbooks, Reissue (Frog Hollow, 2016) and Originals (Anstruther, 2020), as well as a short monograph, Oblique Identity: Form and Whiteness in Recent Canadian Poetry (Frog Hollow, 2019). His more recent research interests include poetry subcultures, poetry anthologies, travel writing, expat communities, and addiction.
His debut full-length collection of critical essays, I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago: Observations on Poetry Culture in Canada, is forthcoming from Gordon Hill Press in Spring of 2022.