Aaron Tucker is the author of the novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books, published June 6th, 2023. His essay “A Cowboy’s Work” was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Non-Fiction Prize and is part of a work-in-progress collection of essays.
Tucker’s latest poetry collection is Catalogue d’oiseaux (Book*hug Press, Spring 2021). His novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) was translated by Rachel Martinez into French as Oppenheimer (La Peuplade) in the summer of 2020. In addition, he is the author of two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).
Tucker’s dissertation “The Flexible Face: Unifying the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” was defended March 2023 and studied the cinema of facial recognition technologies and their impacts on citizenship, mobility, and crisis, receiving the Governor General’s Gold Medal. During his graduate studies he was an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar, and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow; in addition, his graduate writing has won the Film Studies Association of Canada Graduate Student Essay Prize as well as the The Ian Lancashire Promise Award at The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. In September 2023, he is beginning a SSHRC post-doctoral position at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Information recreating the Canadian history of artificial intelligence as a techno-national project.
His collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com).
His poetic works and reviews have been published across Canada. His previous chapbook, apartments, was shortlisted for the 2010 bpNichol Chapbook award.
More information can be found at Wikipedia, ELMCIP, and Scalar.
He was born in Vernon B.C. and grew up in Lavington B.C., on the lands of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Currently, he is a guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Toronto Metropolitan University (Toronto), teaching creative and academic writing. You can reach him artucker[at]yorku[dot]ca