WritersNL’s Lifetime Members
WritersNL is proud to offer Lifetime Memberships to our organization to individuals who have made major contributions to the local literary landscape in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Our Lifetime Members are:
Lillian Bouzane
Bernice Morgan
Tom Dawe
Helen Porter*
Ed Kavanagh
Joan Clark*
Nkwazi Nkuzi Mhango
Anne Hart*
Brian O’Dea
Patrick O’Flaherty*
Thomas Moore
Lisa Moore
Mary Dalton
(* indicates that the Member has passed)
A new Lifetime Member is celebrated annually at WritersNL’s Annual General Meeting.
Want to nominate a Member for this honour? Email WritersNL at info@writersnl.ca.
WritersNL sends congratulations to our 2024 Lifetime Member and our 2024 Volunteer of the Year:
Lifetime Member 2024: 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. Her poetry has been taught in various countries, including Canada, the U.S. (at Yale and Harvard), and Ireland.
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.
In 2010 she founded the SPARKS Literary Festival, which she also directed until 2016.
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.
Dalton lives in St. John’s, where she is Emerita Professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She served as Poet Laureate of the City of St. John’s 2019-2022 . She is the creator and host of the poetry podcast Flahoolic, which is produced by CHMR Radio and is available online at iTunes, Soundcloud, and other podcast platforms.
She gave the 2020 Pratt Lecture at Memorial University “The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry” in March of that year. Her latest book of poems Interrobang was released in September of 2024.
Volunteer of the Year 2024: Ray Critch
By day, Ray Critch is a lawyer practicing civil litigation with McInnes Cooper, where he has appeared at every level of court in Newfoundland and Labrador and at the Supreme Court of Canada. By night, he is a happily married father of two who, once in a while, manages to carve off some spare time to pop to a local sports bar and do some writing.In what now feels like a past life but was actually 2010, he obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. Before getting called to the bar in 2016 he taught at universities in Edinburgh, Vienna, and his hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland.
He has been a past Director and Vice-Chair of WritersNL and continues to serve on the Governance Committee. He also does pro bono contract review for local emerging writers and other pro bono legal work for WritersNL. He has been on the Boards of Shakespeare by the Sea, the Confederation Building Daycare Co-op, among others, and is currently on leave from serving on the boards of Perchance Theatre and Home Again Furniture Bank due to the birth of his second child in April, 2024.