Dan Lukiv: Creative Writer, Researcher

Dan Lukiv teaches English and creative writing at award winning McNaughton Education Centre (a secondary alternate school for troubled teens) in Quesnel, BC. He is a poet, novelist, columnist, short story and article writer, and independent education researcher (hermeneutic phenomenology). His writing has been published in 19 countries (poetry collections in Canada, the USA, Ireland, England, Finland, and South Africa; novels in Canada and the USA; columns in Canada, the USA, South Africa, and Singapore; poems, stories, chapters, papers, and research studies in Canada, the USA, Finland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, England, Wales, Ireland, France, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Singapore, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa, India, Iraq, and Palestine [some poetry has been translated from English into French, Slovenian, and Yugoslavian, and some has been anthologized]). 

Lukiv's formal apprenticeship as a writer came from intensive personal direction from masters such as Canada's Professor Robert Harlow (author of Scann, a Canadian masterpiece; recipient of the George Woodcock Achievement award for an outstanding literary career) and England's D. M. Thomas (internationally acclaimed; recipient of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature, Orwell Prize [biography], Los Angeles Fiction Prize, and Cholmondeley award for poetry). He also studied under USA's novelist Paul Bagdon (Spur Award finalist for Best Original Paperback). Authors who have influenced his writing the most: fiction—Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway; poetry—many Bible writers (Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the apostle John). Two of Lukiv's hobbies: the search for haiku moments in nature and the study of mathematics. From his body of published works, some of his favourites: The Lead Guitarist and The Wise Man (collections of poems), One More Year to Remember (a collection of haiku and senryu), Quibils and Quirks (a novel for children), The Master Teacher (a survival guide for teachers), and Direction for Creative Writing Teachers and An Introductory Creative Writing Program (textbooks). 

Since 1978, he has edited the literary journal CHALLENGER international, which focuses attention on young, up-and-coming Canadian poets, and since 2001, he has edited The Journal of Secondary Alternate Education, a forum of research, theory, and practise. He is married and has four daughters, and serves as an elder in a congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in Quesnel.