Sergiy Yakovenko completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He also holds a Candidate of Philology degree from the Institute of Literature at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He currently teaches in the Department of English at MacEwan University. His research interests include Canadian literature, English literature, Slavic literatures, and literary theory. He has published on Sheila Watson, Howard O'Hagan, Charles G. D. Roberts, Roy Kiyooka, and Michael Crummey. He is also the author of two comparative monographs (in Ukrainian) on Polish and Ukrainian prose fiction of the twentieth century and modernist literary criticism. His translation of Tamara Hundorova's The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s received MLA's honorary mention.

Howard O'Hagan was one of the first native-born westerners to make a mark on Canadian literature. The purpose of this collection of essays on the works of O'Hagan, edited by Sergiy Yakovenko, is not only to refresh scholarship on his best known work, Tay John, but also to break the vicious circle of ignoring O'Hagan's other works--his later novel The School-Marm Tree (1977) and his short stories and sketches, collected in Wilderness Men (1958) and The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station and Other Stories (1963). This volume offers two original articles on The School-Marm Tree, by Renée Hulan and Carl Watts, and Albert Braz's profound study of O'Hagan's Wilderness Men. Among the other contributors: Joseph Pivato, D.M.R. Bentley, Kylee-Anne Hingston, Jack Robinson, Sergiy Yakovenko, and something from Howard O'Hagan himself.