Stan Persky

Stan Persky (* 19th January 1941 in Chicago , Illinois ) is a from the United States originating Canadian writer , media commentator and former university lecturer. The writer won in 2006 the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for his non-fiction book The Short Version: An ABC Book and was in 2010 with the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence award.

Life

Stanley Joel Persky was born in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager he made contact with Jack Kerouac , Allen Ginsberg and the other writers of the Beat Generation , who encouraged him in his writing ambitions. Persky did his military service in the United States Navy and then moved to San Francisco in the early 1960s. There he became part of a group of writers that included Jack Spicer , Robert Duncan , Robin Blaser and George Stanley .

In 1966, Stan Persky and Robin Blaser moved to Vancouver , Canada , where he attended the University of British Columbia and earned his degrees in anthropology and sociology . He studied with the anthropologist Michael Kew , the political philosopher Bob Rowan and the sociologist Roy Turner . In addition, he studied briefly as a graduate student with Rowans, the political philosopher Joseph Tussmann , in an experimental program at the University of California, Berkeley .

He received Canadian citizenship in 1972. During the 1960s and 1970s, Persky was a prominent member of the student and civil rights movement , an early member of the editorial board of Georgia Straight , an early alternative daily newspaper, and - along with Dennis Wheeler - co-founder of the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement , which would later become New Start Books .

After graduation, Persky worked for the Vancouver Mental Patients Association and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before becoming a college instructor in the Sociology Department of Northwest College in Terrace , British Columbia . He then briefly taught at Malaspina College in Nanaimo , British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Burnaby . Since 1983 he was a professor at Capilano University in North Vancouver , first for political studies and then for philosophy. Persky has lived temporarily in Vancouver and Berlin since 1990 .

In 1989 he published Buddy's: Meditations on Desire . In this book, he used the story of Buddy’s , a popular homosexual bar in the West End of Vandcouver that opened in spring 1982 and had to close in summer 1988, as a portrait of Canadian gay culture of the late 1980s with autobiographical elements against the backdrop of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Threat . This work earned him the first nomination for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1990 , which he won 16 years later with The Short Version: An ABC Book (2005), which was also colored autobiographically . When Stan Persky received the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence in 2010 for his literary excellence , his predecessor Terry Glavin praised him as the “ Socrates ” of British Columbia, of whom the region could be proud: “Stan Persky is our Socrates. British Columbians can rightly boast that he is truly one of ours. "

Persky is the author of about 20 books and works as a media commentator for CBC / Radio-Canada , as a literary columnist for The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun . He has also written articles for the following magazines: The Body Politic , This Magazine , New Directions , Saturday Night , Books in Canada and The Tyee . He is also a regular article author for the trendy blog Dooney's Cafe .

In his latest book, Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade 2000-2009 (2012), Stan Persky expresses his skepticism about the cultural crisis in which print publications are increasingly losing ground to the new media. He complains about a considerable loss of cognitive skills as a result of the revolutionary technological development in communication technology: “Gradual, slow decline in reading and knowledge skills since 1975. I haven't seen any books challenging the data. I take the decline in reading and reading competence to be a symptom of the condition of encroaching ignorance. "

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• Lives of the French Symbolist Poets (San Francisco: White Rabbit Press, 1967)
• Wrestling the Angel (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1977)
• Son of Socred (Vancouver: New Star, 1979)
• The House That Jack Built (Vancouver: New Star, 1980)
• At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and the Rise of the Solidarity Trade Union (Vancouver: New Star, 1981)
• The Solidarity Sourcebook (Vancouver: New Star, 1982; edited with Henry Flam)
• Flaunting It: A Decade of Gay Journalism from The Body Politic (Vancouver: New Star, 1982; edited with Ed Jackson)
• Bennett II (Vancouver: New Star, 1983)
• America, the Last Domino: US Foreign Policy in Central America Under Reagan (Vancouver, New Star, 1984)
• The Supreme Court of Canada Decision on Abortion (Vancouver: New Star, 1988; edited with Shelagh Day)
• Fantasy Government: Bill Vander Zalm and the Future of Social Credit (Vancouver: New Star, 1989)
• Buddy's: Meditations on Desire (Vancouver: New Star, 1989; 1991)
• Mixed Media, Mixed Messages (Vancouver: New Star, 1991)
• Then We Take Berlin: Stories from the Other Side of Europe (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1995; Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1996); US title: Boyopolis: Sex And Politics In Gay Eastern Europe (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1996)
• Autobiography of a Tattoo (Vancouver: New Star, 1997)
• Delgamuukw: The Supreme Court of Canada Decision on Aboriginal Title (Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation and Greystone, 1998; edited and annotated)
• On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (Vancouver: New Star, 2001; with John Dixon)
• The Short Version: An ABC Book (Vancouver: New Star, 2005)
• Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education (Vancouver: New Star, 2007)
• Robin Blaser (Vancouver: New Star, 2010; with Brian Fawcett)
• Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade, 2000-2009 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011)

Awards and nominations

• 1990: Shortlist Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for Buddy’s
• 2006: Winner of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize with The Short Version: An ABC Book
• 2010: Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence

Web links

• http://stanpersky.de/

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Katie Fedosenko: Alum Stan Persky wins Lt.-Gov's Award for Literary Excellence.. In: ArtsWire. University of British Columbia . May 5, 2010. Retrieved April 15, 2012.
2. ↑ http://vancouverartinthesixties.com/people/185
3. ^ Portrait of Stan Persky on ABC Bookworld . Retrieved April 14, 2012.
4. ^ Author portrait on New Star Books . Retrieved April 13, 2012.
5. ^ ^{A b} Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. 1990
6. ↑ Ralph Sarkonak: Immigrant Memoirs. Review; George Jonas: "Beethoven '& # 128; & # 153; s Mask: Notes on My Life and Times." & Stan Persky: "The Short Version: An ABC Book". ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Canadian Literature # 191, December 8, 2011. April 15, 2012.
7. ↑ http://thetyee.ca/Bios/Stan_Persky/
8. ↑ http://www.dooneyscafe.com/
9. ↑ ^{a b c} " Brett Josef Grubisic: Uncertain future for serious reading. Persky grapples with a timely question: Why bother with serious books when YouTube is a tap away? ( Memento of the original from January 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: Der . archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested Please review the original and archive link according to instructions and remove then this note. "In: Vancouver Sun . January 7, 2012. Retrieved April 15, 2012. 
10. ↑ Richard Cole: Nonfiction Review by Richard Cole: Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett's Robin Blaser. ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Malahat Review . No. 176. Summer 2011.
11. ↑ review; André Alexis: Confronting the cultural crisis. In: The Globe and Mail . December 27, 2011. Retrieved April 14, 2012.
12. ^ Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. 2006
13. ^ Stan Persky wins BC literary award. CBC / Radio-Canada - April 8, 2010. Retrieved April 14, 2012.