Born in Brandon, Manitoba, Janice Williamson moved as a child to rural Ontario where and grew up in Pickering - at the time a rural area. After studying at Carleton University in Ottawa where she was introduced to anti-war politics, feminism, womens' social and literary history, the poetics of the West Coast TISH group and French New Wave cinema among others, she travelled on her own through Europe and French West Africa. Later, she worked in the lowest ranks of Toronto's print and electronic journalism and completed graduate studies in 1987 at York University with a PhD thesis Citing Resistance: Vision, Space, Authority and Transgression in Canadian Women's Poetry.

Since then she has lectured widely, publishing on women's writing, especially Canadian and feminist cultural studies from written and video readings of West Edmonton Mall to studies of Canadian incest narratives and the politics of abjection. Many of her publications emerged from her intellectual and activist interest in social change. Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace (principal editor with Deborah Gorham, Women's Press, 1989) developed in response to her arrest and trial with 28 other women for non-violent civil disobedience to protest the Canadian manufacture of the guidance system of the Cruise Missile. Her book works include Crybaby! (NeWest Press, 1998). This image/text memoir explores family photography as well as the conundrum of writing autobiographical narratives in a culture that refuses to acknowledge tales of pain except as voyeuristic spectacle or whining. One of Crybaby!'s threads - an exploration of a woman's infertility - became the root work for a current writing/life project.

On January 15, 1999, Janice joyfully adopted her long-awaited first child - the beautiful and talented seventeen-month old Rae Xiao Bao from the city of Maoming in the south of Guandong Province, China. "Becoming Mah" (a working title) enters the complex world of cross-cultural international adoptive parenting, Chinese cultural and social policies affecting women and the pleasures of becoming a mother in the middle of one's life.

Her first work on Canadian women artists was with Bridgett Elliot as co-curator and co-author of Dangerous Goods: Feminist Visual Art Practices (Edmonton Art Gallery, 1990). For the past four years, an interdisciplinary SSHRC-supported research project "West of Where?" on contemporary prairie women writers and artists has enabled a fruitful collaboration with art historian Lynne Bell, Chair, Art & Art History, University of Saskatchewan and an ongoing series of interviews and presentations. This project is developing into a mixed-genre book work that will include archives, essays, interviews, images and creative texts from prairie/bush women of Canada's west.

Other published works include: a collection of innovative prose/poetry image/text collection: Tell Tale Signs: fictions (Turnstone Press, 1991), several chapbooks including, Altitude X 2 (disOrientation Press, 1992) and :a boy named (arsonist auntie, 1996) --winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award. She also edited the widely-cited Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (University of Toronto Press, 1993) and co-edited with Claudine Potvin Women's Writing and the Literary Institution (University of Alberta Press, 1992.)

See my Curriculum Vitae