David Waltner-Toews



David Waltner-Toews (1948- ) is a Canadian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. By profession he is a veterinarian, epidemiologist, and a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses and ecosystem health.

Life
A professor in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, he is the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières, and founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health. He is best known for his work on animal and human infectious diseases in relation to complexity.

In addition to roughly 100 peer-reviewed scholarly papers and a textbook (Ecosystem Sustainability and Health: a practical approach, Cambridge, 2004), he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, an award-winning collection of short stories (One Foot in Heaven), a murder mystery (Fear of Landing) and a book about the natural history of diseases people get from animals (The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans). In 2011 he collaborated with artist Diane Maclean on her exhibition Bird at Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum, contributing a new poem, The Love Song of the Javanese Singing Cock

Recognition

 * Pfizer Award for Research Excellence, 1998.
 * 2006 Winner, Best Regional Fiction – Canada West, Independent Publisher Book Awards, for One Foot in Heaven
 * 2007 Finalist, Canadian Science Writers' Association Book Award, for Chickens Fight Back

Poetry
Poetry, Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, Gameo.org, Web, June 13, 2012.
 * That Inescapable Animal. Goshen, IN, 1974.
 * The Earth is One Body. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1979.
 * Good Housekeeping. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1983. ISBN 0-88801-081-8
 * Endangered Species. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1988.
 * The Impossible Uprooting. McClelland & Stewart, 1995. ISBN: 0-7710-8783-7
 * The Fat Lady Struck Dumb. Brick Books, 2000. ISBN 9781894078122

Prose

 * One Animal Among Many: Gaia, Goats and Garlic. NC Press, 1991. ISBN: 1-55021-067-X.
 * Food, Sex and Salmonella. NC Press, 1992. ISBN: 1-55021-068-8.
 * Good for the Animals, Good for You. University of Guelph, 1994.
 * Ecosystem Sustainability and health: a practical approach. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
 * The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans. Greystone Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1553652700
 * The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty and Managing for Sustainability (with James Kay and Nina-Marie Lister). New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.