Stuart Ross is the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Harbourfront Festival Prize. He is a Cobourg-based fiction writer, poet, editor, translator, and creative-writing instructor. He has been active in the Toronto literary scene since the mid-1970s. In 1987, he co-founded, with Nicholas Power, the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, and was co-coordinator of the fair for its first three years. In 2008, he became a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective, which puts on the annual Indie Literary Market and administers the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Stuart is the author of twelve full poetry collections, most recently 70 Kippers: The Dagmar Poems (w/ Michael Dennis; Proper Tales Press, 2020); Motel of the Opposable Thumbs (ECW Press, 2019); A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016), winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry; A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015); Our Days in Vaudeville (Mansfield Press, 2013), for which he collaborated with 29 other Canadian poets; and You Exist. Details Follow. (Anvil Press, 2012), which won the sole award given to an Anglo writer in 2013 by l'Académie de la vie littéraire au tournant du 21ême siècle.