Miriam Waddington (1917–2004)

Miriam Waddington, née Dworkin, was born to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She studied English at the University of Toronto and social work at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1945, she moved to Montreal, Quebec, where she worked as a case worker and taught social work for many years. She became part of a Montreal literary circle that included F. R. Scott, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek. Her first published poetry collections, Green World (1945) and The Second Silence (1955), celebrated the natural world. In 1964, she joined the faculty of York University as a professor of English, and taught there until her retirement in 1983.



She was awarded Borestone Mountain Awards for best poetry in the years 1963, 1966, and 1974. She received the J.J. Segal Award in 1972. She was the Canada Council Exchange Poet to Wales in 1980, and served as writer-in-residence at the Windsor Public Library and at the University of Ottawa.
She also wrote a volume of fiction, Summer at Lonely Beach and Other Stories (1982), a critical study of A.M. Klein (1970), and numerous essays and reviews. She edited John Sutherland: Essays, Controversies and Poems (1972), Klein's Collected Poems (1974), and Canadian Jewish Short Stories (1990).

Her poem "Jacques Cartier in Toronto" was featured on the back of the Canadian $100 bill released in 2004.