Joseph Kidney is the author of Devotional Forensics (icehouse poetry), winner of the Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize and shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, and TriQuarterly. He won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry, the Poem of the Year Contest from Arc Poetry Magazine, the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2 for the best poem submitted by an author under 35. Named a 2026 “writer to watch” by CBC Books, he has served as Deer Lake Artist in Residence (British Columbia), Port Austin Artist in Residence (Michigan), with a residency in 2026 at the Banff Centre (Alberta). He has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Civitella Ranieri. He has been interviewed by Karen Solie (for The Griffin Poetry Prize YouTube Channel), by Pádraig Ó Tuama (for Poetry Unbound), by Rachael Hegarty (for RTÉ Radio 1’s Poetry People), and by Tom Power (for CBC’s Q). Having completed his PhD in early modern drama at Stanford University, he now works as a lecturer in Stanford’s Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program. A chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea was published with Anstruther Press. He divides his time between the Bay Area and Vancouver.