His father is Bruce Allen Powe, author of the novels, Killing Ground, The Aberhart Summer and The Ice Eaters, among many.

He won the prestigious Book Award at York University for the highest grades achieved in his final year.

He was then awarded an also prestigious Humanities Research Council scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Toronto.

Powe received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1981; he studied there with Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye and Brian Parker.

His PhD is on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, their crossings in history, their agon and complementarity (their conflicts and harmonies), and the stirring alchemy of their thought.

Poet, novelist, essayist, and critic, in 1995, B. W. Powe began teaching in the Department of English at York University where he taught first year introduction to literature courses as well as two additional courses entitled Visionary Literature: from Hildegard von Bingen and Dante to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Two Canadian Theorists.

He has been called "way cool" by The Globe and Mail, "one of our finest cultural commentators" by the Toronto Star, a poet who can write "hair-raising lines" that seem to come "fully formed from the cosmos" by The Globe and Mail and who takes "considerable, unfashionable risks" by The Malahat Review, "a visionary--a modern day Magellan" by the Montreal Gazette, "an intellectual terrorist" by Barbara Amiel in Maclean's, and "enigmatic...and necessary..." by the Edmonton Journal.

Kenneth J. Harvey said Powe's "Heart beats against the current... [and in his work] at its ultimate core invents something original--and oftentimes breathtaking... To say brilliant would be an understatement" (Ottawa Citizen).

Canadian Literature said of his poetry that "[his] subtly textured themes...affirm the importance of the romantic voice in these troubled times."

At IdeaCity in 2001 Moses Znaimer called B. W. Powe's stances, public lectures and writings "a combination of poetry and rock'n'roll."

Powe goes where he has not gone in any of his previous work... and written luminous, numinous pieces of mystical and humanistic sensibility."

Wait for the book's kicker: a call for the establishment of a republic in a twenty-first Canada that has...pirouetted away from 'the last vestiges of colonialism and empire.'"

[4] He read from this work at The Northrop Frye International Festival in Moncton in April 2011, and in Barcelona, Spain, at the McLuhan 100 conference, in May 2011.

His non-fiction study, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye--Apocalypse and Alchemy, was published by the University of Toronto Press in May 2014.