Jim Hoffman is a retired theatre professor and scholar of BC theatre history. He has authored and edited several publications on George Ryga, including a biography, an edited collection of his stage plays, and an edited collection of his prairie novels. Currently a research affiliate at the University of Victoria, he is writing a history of Theatre Energy, a West Kootenay collective that created and toured original plays from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. He was instrumental in obtaining the company's papers for the University of Victoria library archives, and has donated his own research materials on Ryga to the George Ryga Papers at the University of Calgary library.