Mary Dalton


Mary Dalton is a Canadian poet and educator.

Life and career

Mary Dalton was born in the parish of Harbour Main, Newfoundland and Labrador.
She edited Newfoundland Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 1987 and was editor and co-publisher of
TickleAce. A literary journal of Newfoundland and Labrador from 1980 to 1986.
Dalton founded the SPARKS Literary Festival in 2009 and served also as the festival's director for the first six years. SPARKS celebrates the literary creations of Newfoundland and Labrador and showcases writers at various stages of their creative lives. It is what Dalton has called a 'word spree'".
She is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's and Poet Laureate of the City of St. John’s.
Her latest collection of poems is the limited-edition letter-press chapbook Waste Ground, with engravings by Abigail Rorer of Massachusetts.

Awards and honors

Dalton has won various awards for her poetry, among them the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Poetry in 1997, 2002 and 2006, as well as the TickleAce/Cabot Award for Poetry in 1998. Her collection Merrybegot was awarded the 2005 E. J. Pratt Poetry Award and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. It was also shortlisted for the 2004 all-genre Winterset Award, the 2004 Pat Lowther Award, and the 2005 Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award. Her fourth collection is Red Ledger, published by Véhicule Press, which was shortlisted for the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award and the Atlantic Poetry Award. In 2008 a set of her riddling poems, Between You and the Weather, was published by Running the Goat Books. Hooking: A Book of Centos was released by Véhicule Press in 2013. It was shortlisted for the 2014 J. M. Abraham Award, the newly named Atlantic Poetry Prize, and for the inaugural Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, also in 2014.

Poetry

  • The Time of Icicles.
  • Allowing the Light.
  • Merrybegot
  • Red Ledger.
  • Between You and the Weather. Wood engravings by Wesley W. Bates.
  • Hooking: A Book of Centos.
  • Waste Ground. Chapbook, with wood engravings by Abigail Rorer.
  • ''Interrobang''

Prose

Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews.
  • The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry. Text of the 2020 Pratt Lecture, delivered on March 4, 2020.

In anthologies

Choice Atlantic: Writers of Newfoundland and the Maritimes.Words Out There: Women Poets in Atlantic Canada.
  • New Canadian Poetry ; the edges of time.
  • Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry.Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology of Poems in English, edited by Evan Jones and Todd Swift.
  • The Art of the Sonnet, edited by Stephen Burt and David Mikics, Harvard University Press.
  • The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013, edited by Sue Goyette.
  • The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry, edited by Mark Callanan and James Langer.70 Canadian Poets, edited by Gary Geddes.
  • Earth and Heaven : An Anthology of Myth Poetry, edited by Amanda Jernigan and Evan Jones.
  • The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English, edited by Anita Lahey and Molly Peacock.