Brenda Schmidt was the seventh Saskatchewan Poet Laureate. Author of five books of poetry and a book of essays, her work has been nominated for Saskatchewan Book Awards, received the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry, and is included in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English: Tenth Anniversary Edition. Over the years she has served on the board of directors of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and Sage Hill Writing, and more recently as poetry editor for Grain. She gardens on a dry hillside in central west Saskatchewan in Treaty 6 territory, and has several rain barrels.