James Crerar Reaney, OC FRSC (September 1, 1926 – June 11, 2008) was a Canadian poet, playwright, librettist, and professor,[1] "whose works transform small-town Ontario life into the realm of dream and symbol.

[6] The same year he also received the Governor General's Award, the first of three, at the age of 23, for his first book of poetry, Red Heart..[7] Reaney married fellow poet Colleen Thibaudeau on December 29, 1951 in St.

While not published in book form until years later, his stories were influential in establishing the style of writing later called Southern Ontario Gothic[6] (later made world-famous by Alice Munro).

This journal published a variety of poets, including Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, Milton Acorn,[3] and bp Nichol, and work from such artists as Tony Urquhart, and Greg Curnoe.

[11] As well, Reaney coauthored several operas with musician John Beckwith, including Night-Blooming Cereus (1960), The Shivaree (1982), and Crazy To Kill (1988).

[14] Critics have called him a colonial, a rationalist and internationalist, a rabid nationalist, a symbolist, and a poet with the myth of coherence who is yet able to say something in an age of the random.

"[8] Reaney's fiction of the 1940s and 1950s (collected in the 1994 book The Box Social and Other Stories, was "influential in establishing the style of writing that has since become known as ‘Southern Ontario Gothic’.

Playing sophisticated games by switching voice, he achieves a kind of ‘magic realism’, often through the distorted perspective and sense of disproportion of his child narrators.