Ashok Mathur was born in Bhopal, India, and immigrated to Canada with his family in 1962. He was one year old. At first they settled in Nova Scotia but by 1968 they were in Calgary.

Journalism school followed high school, and by 1981 Ashok was working as a photojournalist with small Alberta dailies and freelancing for magazines and wire services.

In 1985 Ashok returned to school, completing bachelor and master of arts degrees at the University of Calgary, after which he started teaching at the University and the Alberta College of Art. Around the same time, he became involved in community activism, sitting on the board of The New Gallery, an artist-run centre, joining the editorial board of the literary magazine absinthe, and becaming more aware of issues surrounding the politics of anti-racism in the arts.

He and co-founder Nicole Markotic started disOrientation chapbooks with the intent to publish relatively unheard voices in a chapbook format. Chapbooks, small-run publications with non-standard paper, presentation, and binding, became more interesting to Ashok and he has since curated public exhibitions of book-type publications from around the world ("Book endS and odd books," Banff Centre; "BookendS West," Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver).

Ashok also became part of Minquon Panchayat, an activist artist collective comprised of First Nations artists and artists of colour that addressed racism in the arts on a national level. He was a participant in the Writing Thru Race conference, a turning point for racialized writers in Canada, and he recently co-chaired the Racial Minority Writers Committee for the Writers Union of Canada.

Ashok finished his Ph.D. in English at the University of Calgary in 1999 and is currently teaching at the Alberta College of Art and Design (Calgary).

His first book, Loveruage: a dance in three parts, written as a poetic narrative around identity formation, was published in 1993 by Wolsak and Wynn. Once Upon an Elephant, a novel, was published in 1998.

Please visit Ashok's web page at: www.ucalgary.ca/~amathur/once.html