
Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes is a Jamaican-Canadian poet/educator and former nun with an interest in poetic inquiry. A Fellow at Scotland’s Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Fall 2009, her literary publications include the collections: Any Waking Morning (2019), Inanna Publications; Dark Water Songs (2013), Inanna Publications; Travelling Light (2006), long-listed for the 2007 ReLit Poetry Award, and The Fires of Naming (2001), both published by Seraphim Editions.
An alumna of the Banff Writing Studio Program (1998), she is a long-standing member of the Long Dash group of poets and a founding member of the collaborative ekphrastic project between the Long Dash group and studio artists from the Women's Art Association of Canada. She belongs to the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers' Union of Canada, The Women's Art Association of Canada, and The Ontario College of Teachers (OCT).
Her work has appeared in journals in Canada and the UK, including Poetry Wales, Quills, The Toronto Quarterly, Arc and Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme. Her poetry and essays have been published in anthologies and as chapters in edited books... more
Recent books:
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Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes has painted a captivating new set of poetic canvases. Vividly, and with delicate precision, Travelling Light illuminates the people, landscapes and art - across Canada, in Europe, and in Jamaica...more | From the bittersweet memories and yearnings of her Jamaican childhood and her convent years, through to the transforming insights of maturity, her poetic art imbues all she portrays with a wise passion, alternately serene and sorrowful...more |
Readings & Events
- A video of Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes reading from Any Waking Morning (Inanna Publications, 2019).
- In September 2020, Mary Lou joined other Toronto poets from the Long Dash Group to film a C0VID-delayed, outdoor reading in celebration of National Poetry Month.
- An Inquiry Through Poetry & Short Fiction:
Readings by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, nancy viva davis halifax, Nilofar Shidmehr, and Sheila Stewart
October 1, 2019,
6:30 – 8:30PM, Halifax Central Library. - Any Waking Morning
Launch: IFOA Toronto
Lit Up & Inanna, at
A Different Booklist
May 28, 2019, 6-9pm. - The launch of Vallum 26:1 Issue “Connections”, at The Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto
April 26, 2019 - Green Fire: Ecology of Poetry, a National Poetry Month Event featuring the Long Dash Group of Poets, St. Matthew's Clubhouse, 450 Broadview Ave, Toronto
April 14, 2019