The granddaughter of suffragette Nellie Letitia McClung, after whom she was named, Nellie McClung was born in Edmonton in 1929. She attended teacher's training in Ottawa and attended University of Alberta at age 17. She graduated three years later with a B.A. She wrote for the Edmonton Bulletin, the Edmonton Journal, the Red Deer Advocate, Calgary Herald and Edmontonian Magazine. She worked in Vancouver for the Commonwealth Marriage Bureau, then attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in the 1960s. Her early poetry books are Pomegranate, Tea With the Queen, Duenda, Summa Astarte and Baraka. Her more recent titles are My Sex is Ice Cream: The Marilyn Monroe Poems (Ekstasis) and a book of 'terse verse' called I Hate Wives (Ekstatis, 2003). She lives in Vancouver where she is an animal rights activist.

[BCBW 2003] "Poetry"