At the Monday evening council meeting, councillors voted unanimously to appoint Mary Dalton as City of St. John’s poet laureate.
A call for applications for the position resulted in three applications, which were assessed by a selection committee, which recommended Dalton.
Dalton is a professor of English at Memorial University and a founder and past director of the SPARKS Literary Festival.
She has won several awards for her poetry, including the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry for her collection “Merrybegot” (2003), which was also shortlisted for the Winterset Award.
Some of her most recent publications include the 2017 letterpress chapbook “Waste Ground” – a 13-poem sequence celebrating native Newfoundland plants, as well as the scholarly book “Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews,” published by Palimpsest Press in 2015.
