Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, OC OBC FRSC (October 12, 1909 – December 29, 1996) was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General's Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.

[4] In the early 1940s Livesay suggested to Anne Marriott, Floris McLaren, and Doris Ferne that they start a poetry magazine which would serve as a vehicle for poets outside the somewhat closed Montreal circle.

Alan Crawley agreed to edit the magazine, and the first issue of Contemporary Verse appeared in September 1941,[5] After Macnair died in 1959, Livesay worked for UNESCO in Paris, and then in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) as a field worker from 1960 to 1963.

The Encyclopedia of Literature says, "these were well-crafted poems that not only showed skilled use of the imagist technique but prefigured Margaret Atwood's condemnations of exploitative and fearful attitudes to the Canadian landscape."

[2] Her second book of poems, Signpost (1932), "showed the increasing sophistication of her imagist skills, as in 'Green rain', and an original sense of feminine sexuality.

Livesay also won the Queen's Canada Medal in 1977, and the Persons Case Award for the Status of Women in 1984.