Lakshmi Gill is a Canadian educator and author. Among her publications are Returning the Empties, The Third Infinitive, Novena To St. Jude Thaddeus, Mind Walls, and During Rain.
Background
Myrna Lakshmi Gill was born on the 24th of May, 1943 in Manila, Philippines. She is the third daughter of Karam S. and Wilfred Poso Gill. Gill’s parents met at the University of the Philippines and married despite the opposition of maternal relatives. Her mother’s family was Catholic, and her father, a Sikh, converted to Catholicism soon after their marriage. Her father, an entrepreneur, made money in the import and export business and the family, therefore, lived in middle-class comfort.
Education
Gill attended a Catholic convent school in Manila. Soon after her high school graduation, she moved to the United States and attended the Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. In 1964, she moved to Vancouver, where she entered the University of British Columbia and earned a Master of Arts degree in English. In 1985, she received a Bachelor of Education degree from Mount Allison University. She did doctoral work at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton but did not complete it.
Lakshmi Gill began her career as an instructor at the Notre Dame University of Nelson. She also taught at Mount Allison University, University of Victoria, and UBC's English Language Institute (ESL). She was an instructor at the English Language Institute at the University of British Columbia in British Columbia, Canada. Her work as an educator has taken her to Manila, San Francisco, Brighton, London, and Hong Kong for extended periods. Since then, she has given poetry readings in North America and Asia. Currently, she lives in Vancouver.
Gill's first collection, Rape of the Spirit, was published in 1962. In 1966, she published her next collection, During Rain, I Plant Chrysanthemums. Her first publication with a New Brunswick press was in 1970, entitled Mind Walls. She also published her next manuscript with Fiddlehead Poetry Books, entitled Novena to St. Jude Thaddeus (1979). Some of her other works include The Third Infinitive (1993), Returning the Empties, New and Selected Poems: 1960s to 1990s (1998), and anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, USA, Ireland, Australia, India, Macau, Hongkong, and the Philippines.