Mary Dalton

Mary Dalton is the author of five books of poetry, among them Merrybegot, Red Ledger, and Hooking: A Book of Centos, released in 2013 by Vehicule Press. Her work has been anthologized in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, England, and Belgium.

Merrybegot, winner of the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award and a nominee for the Pat Lowther Award, is also an audiobook produced by Rattling Books. Red Ledger was short-listed for the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award and was named a Top Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail. Hooking: A Book of Centos , published in 2013, was shortlisted for the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Award (the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award) and the national Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, and named a Top Book of the season by CBC and The Globe and Mail.

A collection of Dalton’s prose writings, Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, was released by Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2015. Running the Goat Press published a letterpress chapbook, Waste Ground, with illustrations by Massachusetts wood engraver Abigail Rorer, in 2017. The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry, the text of her 2020 Pratt Lecture sponsored by Memorial University, was released in book form by Breakwater in April 2022.

Dalton lives in St. John’s, where she is Emerita Professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Poet Laureate of the City of St. John’s.  In 2010 she founded The SPARKS Literary Festival, which she also directed until 2016.