20 Facts About Keith Maillard

Keith Maillard moved to Canada in 1970 and became a Canadian citizen in 1976.

Keith Maillard's Maillard grandfather and two Montreal-born uncles continued the family tradition of glass-blowing, working for Dominion Glass in Montreal and in Redcliff, Alberta.

Keith Maillard is married with two daughters and lives in West Vancouver.

Keith Maillard left his native West Virginia in 1965 and moved to Boston where he lived for five years.

Keith Maillard worked in the anti-Vietnam-war movement from 1968 to 1970 and contributed numerous articles to Boston underground newspapers and radio: Fusion, Broadside, The Free Press of Boston and WBUR.

Keith Maillard was not eligible for the draft and was a war resister rather than a draft dodger.

Keith Maillard contributed to periodicals, including Fusion, The Body Politic, Malahat Review, Books in Canada, Canadian Literature, and newspapers.

Keith Maillard was in the Writers' Union of Canada, served on the National Council for two years, and co-founded the Federation of BC Writers.

Keith Maillard studied music at Vancouver Community College, played the Irish pipes, taught recorder and the rudiments of music for the Vancouver School Board and Vancouver Community College, and played bass in the first band formed by Vancouver singer-songwriter, Ferron.

Keith Maillard co-produced and arranged her second album Backed Up in 1978.

In 1979 Keith Maillard interviewed Canadian novelist Howard O'Hagan who explained to him his writing process; the interview appeared as a chapter in Margery Fee's Silence Made Visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John.

From 1985 through 1988 Keith Maillard applied his writing skills to designing university and adult education courses for the Open Learning Agency and, from 1986 to 1989, he workshopped his screenplay, Two Strand River, with Patricia Gruben's Praxis Film Development Workshop.

Keith Maillard served as Advisory Editor of PRISM international for 10 years.

Keith Maillard returned to his first love, poetry, and published Dementia Americana, which won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada.

Keith Maillard was one of 35 writers placed on the West Virginia Literary Map in 2004 and he was inducted that year into the Wheeling, West Virginia, Hall of Fame.

In 2004, Keith Maillard returned to the raw Bildungsroman material first published in The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through and rewrote and reshaped it into the Difficulty at the Beginning quartet, which appeared in four volumes between September 2005 and September 2006.

In 2006, with eleven out of fourteen titles nominated for or winners of literary awards, Keith Maillard won UBC's Dorothy Somerset Award for excellence in the creative arts.

Keith Maillard is profiled by the West Virginia Humanities Council in their 2023 online celebration of West Virginia authors.

On September 28,2024, Keith Maillard was awarded the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence.

Keith Maillard's papers are currently held by the University of British Columbia's Rare Books and Special Collections.