In 1973, Hildi Froese Tiessen published the first academic essay about Rudy Wiebe's fiction (included in this volume). Since then, in scholarly essays and talks, she has examined with great insight the literary careers of Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Julia Kasdorf, Sandra Birdsell, and David Waltner-Toews, as well as key origin figures like Arnold Dyck and Al Reimer. Dr. Froese Tiessen’s widely admired essays include several (among the first of their kind) which situate Mennonite literature in relation to postmodernism, as well as investigations of the sometimes disconcerting ethnic and theological assumptions about Mennonite artistic practice. The essays in On Mennonite/s Writing are the first solo collection of Dr. Tiessen’s writings, and she has written a major new piece especially for this publication.

Laurence Neufeld and Monika McKillen, based in western Connecticut, are editors of a recent volume of selected American work by Woldemar Neufeld from 1946 to 1995, New Milford Portfolio: Woldemar Neufeld’s Paintings and Block-prints of New Milford, Connecticut. Laurence Neufeld is the son of Woldemar Neufeld.

Hildi Froese Tiessen's profile page

Smaro Kamboureli is a professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is the founder of the TransCanada series of books, published by WLU Press, originating from interdisciplinary conferences that initiated collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Her most recent publications include Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (WLU Press 2012), co-edited with Robert Zacharias and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (WLU Press, 2013), co-edited with Kit Dobson.

Robert Zacharias' profile page

"Hildi Froese Tiessen has played an essential role in the remarkable flowering of Mennonite/s writing over what is now half a century. The publication of her essays reveals anew the great generosity, critical acumen, and encyclopedic knowledge that Tiessen has offered to the Mennonite writing community." —Jeff Gundy