Karen Mulhallen
Karen Mulhallen (born 1942 in Woodstock, Ontario) is a Canadian educator, poet, critic and editor. She taught English at Ryerson University from 1967 to 2014 and played key editing roles at The Canadian Forum, serving as poetry review editor (1974–1979) and features editor (1975–1988). She was the editor-in-chief of Descant from 1973 until the magazine closed in 2015.
She earned a BA in 1963 from Waterloo Lutheran University (now Wilfrid Laurier University), an MA in English in 1967, and a PhD in English in 1975, all from the University of Toronto. For 42 years she led Descant, a Toronto-based quarterly of poetry, prose and visual arts, during which the magazine won six Canadian National Magazine Awards and a Litho Award for outstanding printing.
Mulhallen is a Blake scholar who taught at Ryerson and was an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Early in her career she was shy about submitting work, but Descant’s involvement in the early 1970s helped change that. She is a prolific writer, with 18 books of poetry, edited volumes and dozens of essays and articles published in Canada and the UK.
In 2010 she organized and chaired a symposium, "Blake In Our Time: A Symposium Celebrating the Future of Blake Studies & the Legacy of G.E. Bentley Jr." She is often described as a metaphysical poet. Her latest poetry collection, Code Orange: An Emblazoned Suite, is a bilingual French/English edition translated by Nancy Huston (Black Moss Press, 2015). Her papers are archived at the University of Calgary and at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:25 (CET).