Fonds F3109 - Diane Dawber fonds

Diane Elizabeth Dawber, B.A., M.Ed. (Queen's University) was born in Belleville, ON. She is a poet, author, educator, researcher, and health advocate. She taught from 1965-1990, mostly at the elementary level but also as Consultant for the Arts K-12 for the Lennox-Adding School Board and as first Writing Adjunct Professor for the Artist in Community Program at Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Kington. She was disabled with chronic illness in 1990.

Dawber has written two poetry collections for adults and five poetry collections for younger readers. She has given many school visits and workshops, an open-mic series in Kingston, and an anthology of Kingston poets came out of these works. Many poems have been anthologized. She won the Banff Centre Pilot Project in Writing, 1980 as well as the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario Writers Award, 1982, 1987 and 1991.

The study group she started for disabled teachers and nurses in 1996 met monthly for 20 years and morphed into an incorporated non-profit -- Health Pursuits Group later named Health Pursuits Reading and Research: MEND -- from 2010 until dissolution in 2022. Their research helped hundreds of people with difficult issues and won a large Ontario Trillium Award in 2012. Three non-fiction books came out of this work.

Selected works include "Cankerville"(Borealis, 1984), "Oatmeal Mittens" (Borealis,1987), "Writers on Writing" (Grolier, 1989), "My Underwear's Inside Out" (Quarry Press, 1991), "How Do You Wrestle a Goldfish?" (Borealis Press, 1997), "Lifting the Bull: Back Pain, Fibromyalgia and Environmental Illness" (Quarry Press, 1999), and "The Nutrient Scent Test (Health Pursuits Reading and Research: MEND, 2017).

Diane has two sons with her first husband Christopher (1943-2012), two grandsons, and a whole step-family of daughter, and two granddaughters from her second husband Bernard Gates (1935-2023).