Leaving Shadows

Originally from St. Paul, Alberta, Lisa Grekul has lived in Mbabane (Swaziland), Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver. She completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Alberta, and she holds a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. Now residing in Kelowna, she teaches Canadian literature in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Balancing a talent for fiction and skill for scholarly inquiry, Grekul's published works investigate the role and place of fourth- and fifth-generation Ukrainians in Canada. Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada's Ukrainians (University of Alberta, 2005) is her second book; her first, Kalyna's Song (Coteau, 2003), was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Best First Book Award and the inaugural Kobzar Literary Award. Currently, she is at work on a book- and film-project, (Con)temporary Nomads: Canadian Autobiography and the Search for Home, focused on Eastern European diasporic communities in Canada.

• Ukrainian Canadians: A Study in Assimilation; "Digesting" the "Foreign Mass": Ukrainian Canadians in Three Anglo-Canadian Novels; Re-reading the Female Ethnic Subject: Vera Lysenko's Yellow Boots; Ethnic Revival versus Historical Revision: Ukrainian Canadians and Multiculturalism; "We aren't buying black oxfords": The Ambivalent Politics of Hybridity in Maara Haas's The Street Where I Live; "We laugh, but we are sad": Oral History in George Ryga's A Letter to My Son; "Easter bread and clouds": The Poetry of Andrew Suknaski; From Multiculturalism to Transculturalism: Shifting Paradigms in the Search for Identity; From Canada to Ukraine-and Back: Janice Kulyk Keefer's The Green Library and Honey and Ashes; Between Borders, Beyond Bloodlines: Myrna Kostash's Creative Non-fiction; Monumental Culture and the Future of Ukrainian Canadian Literature; Index.

"Grekul does a close reading of Bloodlines and The Doomed Bridegroom, by Myrna Kostash a self-proclaimed second-generation Ukrainian Canadian, feminist, writer, alumna of the 1960s, who was confronted by Eastern European gender roles..Grekul draws comparisons between Kostash's perspective and that of Kulyk Keefer, (in The Green Library and Honey and Ashes: A Story of a Family), 'the inherent gaps' between history and historiography, that is, historical realities and representations of these realities." Anne Burke, Prairie Journal Trust, February, 2006.