Shane Neilson

1975-

Shane Douglas Neilson (family physician and writer) was born 29 September 1975 in Sheffield, New Brunswick, and moved to Oromocto when he was eight years old. Upon graduating from Oromocto High School, he studied biochemistry at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton for three years. Neilson then applied to the Dalhousie Medical School. In 2000, he began his medical residency at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and after returned to Halifax where he spent a year as a trauma doctor in the teaching hospital’s emergency ward which led him to write Call Me Doctor (2006). He completed a Ph.D. in McMaster‘s English and Cultural Studies Department. Neilson now lives in Guelph, ON and practices at the East Wellington Family Health facility, and he continues to write poetry. He has become a critically acclaimed poet and author, his first work appearing in the New Brunswick Reader, a literary supplement of the Telegraph-Journal. In the following years, he published poems in eighteen periodicals, including four collections of his own poetry. His work includes The Beaten Down Elegies (2003); Alden Nowlan and Illness (2004); Exterminate My Heart (2008); Meniscus (2009); Approaches to Poetry: The Pre-Poem Moment (2009); Complete Physical (2010); Gunmetal Blue (2011) and Alice and George (2012). Neilson is also an editor with Fog Hollow Press in Victoria, BC. In 2009 he received the Mimi Divinsky Award for History and Narrative in Family Medicine. In 2010, he was awarded first prize for his poem “New Year’s Day” in the 15th annual Poem of the Year contest for Arch Poetry Magazine. Dysphoria won the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award for Poetry in 2018.  He currently serves as an adjunct assistant clinical professor of medicine at McMaster University’s Waterloo campus.

Predominant New Brunswick Residences:

Oromocto, Sheffield