Biography
Don Kerr was as a poet with a unique Prairie voice. He wrote with nuance and love about Saskatchewan and Saskatoon, where he was born, and stressed the importance of local culture and history. Kerr, who served as the province’s Poet Laureate and received its Order of Merit, also wrote short stories, plays, a musical, and a book about Saskatoon’s past. He began his long writing career as a poet. In Wind Thrashing Your Heart, his last collection (2011), Kerr contemplates love and landscapes—his subject also in The Dust of Just Beginning (2010), As well as being a poet, Kerr was a historian, an advocate for heritage preservation, a public intellectual and professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, where he taught for forty-four years.