Mary Dalton


Mary Dalton is a Canadian poet and educator, born at Lake View, Conception Bay, Newfoundland in 1950. She is a retired professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, and founder of the at the university. Dalton is also a former editor of the Newfoundland literary journal Tickleace and currently St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador's poet laureate.

Career

Dalton has won various awards for her poetry, among them several for Poetry as well as the TickleAce/Cabot Award for Poetry in 1997. Her collection Merrybegot was awarded the 2005 E. J. Pratt Poetry Award, 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 Vehicle 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. Her latest collection of poems is the chapbook WasteGround.
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 as the festival's director for the first 6 years. SPARKS celebrates "the literary creations of Newfoundland and Labrador and showcase writers at various stages of their creative lives. It is what Dalton has called a 'word spree' ".
Dalton's poetry has frequently been anthologized and some of these anthologies are: Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry ; New Canadian Poetry ; the edges of time ; Their Lives and Times ; Windhorse Reader:Choice Poems of '93 ; Words Out There: Women Poets in Atlantic Canada ; Choice Atlantic: Writers of Newfoundland and the Maritimes.