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DesRuisseaux, who died in January 2016, was born in Sherbrooke, Que., and studied philosophy at the University of Montreal. He won the Governor General’s Award for French-language poetry in 1989, and also wrote about Quebec culture and language.

Lightman, who has become well-known for exposing plagiarist poets, believes DesRuisseaux got away with using the work of giants like Angelou and Thomas by translating their poems into French, for an audience that would likely be unfamiliar with the source material. It’s a fairly common strategy among plagiarists, he said.

“When you get an English plagiarist, they tend to borrow from an American poet,” while an Australian might steal from a Canadian, he said. “They’re taking from another country and their target audience… has not read it.”

It was an Ontario poet, Kathy Figueroa, who first noticed something was up in May 2016. She was looking up Canada’s current poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke, when she came across an English translation of DesRuisseaux’s J’avance on the Parliament of Canada website. It had been chosen by his family members to honour his memory, but Figueroa identified it right away as Angelou’s Still I Rise.

“I recognized it immediately and just sort of went into shock. I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It was obvious that he ripped her off. It was blatant, it was obvious, it was appalling.”

Photo by AP Photo/Todd Plitt, File

Figueroa said she contacted the Library of Parliament, and the poem was quickly taken down. She also wrote a post about it on the Facebook group “Plagiarism Alerts,” where Lightman found it and took up the torch.