Jim Westergard was born in Ogden, Utah in 1939. He was educated at a variety of colleges and universities in California, Arizona and Utah where he completed his BFA and MFA at Utah State. Westergard taught at Metropolitan State College and Northern Illinois University before moving to Alberta in 1975, where he taught at Red Deer College until his retirement in 1999. He became a Canadian citizen in 1980.

Jim Westergard has been creating prints from wood engravings since university days in the late 60s, but had never completed a book-length collection until the original limited letterpress edition of Mother Goose Eggs. The first engraving for this project was finished in 1999. Then, after a four-year struggle which included an unexpected hernia operation and reprinting the press-sheets a second time with helpful hints from Crispin Elsted of the Barbarian Press (Mission, BC), Mother Goose Eggs was finally bound and released in a deluxe edition of eighty copies in 2003.

Westergard continues to create wood engravings on his cantankerous old VanderCook SP-15 proof press which he has affectionately named the ‘Spanish Fly’. His recent titles include Oddballs (Porcupine’s Quill, 2015) and See What I’m Saying? (Porcupine’s Quill, 2018).

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Jason Brink has published short fiction in the University of Victoria’s “Inner Harbour Review” and won the Praxis Screenplay Competition for his feature length drama, “Summer Fallow.” He lives in Red Deer, Alberta.

Jim Westergard’s wood engravings and drawings have been exhibited internationally. He is the author and illustrator of “Mother Goose Eggs,” “sunnyside up” (Porcupine’s Quill). He lives in Red Deer, Alberta.

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