Mary Dalton was born at Lake View in Conception Bay, Newfoundland.  She is Professor of English in the Department of English Literature and Language at Memorial University in St. John’s, where she teaches various poetry courses. Her poems, reviews, essays and interviews have been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, Ireland and the United States, most recently in Open Field: Contemporary Canadian Poets, released by Persea Books of New York in April 2005.  Mary is a former editor of Tickle Ace and of the interdisciplinary journal Newfoundland Studies.

Mary Dalton has published three volumes of poetry, The Time of Icicles (Breakwater, 1989 and 1991), Allowing the Light (Breakwater, 1993) and Merrybegot (Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 2003), in addition to a chapbook of poems also entitled Merrybegot (Running the Goat Books and Broadsides, 2002).  Another collection is forthcoming from Véhicule in the spring of 2006. She has won various awards for her poetry, among them the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Competition for Poetry in 1997 and again in 2002 and the inaugural TickleAce/Cabot Award for Poetry in 1998. Merrybegot was shortlisted for the 2004 all-genre Winterset Award, the 2004 Pat Lowther Memorial Poetry Award, and is the winner of the 2005 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry.