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: Slender Certainties (2025), Aeolus House; 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:

		The poems in Any Waking Morning probe deeply into love, loss and life’s darker dilemmas. They seek pathways and meaning, interrogate endings and life changes, and tap the creative energy engendered through art’s ekphrastic cycles...more
		The poems in Dark Water Songs begin on the margins of islands and ancestors, and fan out, probing love, loss and life's dilemmas. They expand and deepen the poetic exploration which began with the poet's earlier collections...more
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

• Slender Certainties:
  Launch:
  Society Clubhouse
  967 College Street
  May 24, 2025,
  Doors open at 1:30 - Readings begin at 2:00pm.


• Heart-Threads: Bonds that Bind:
  A National Poetry Month Reading
  by the Long Dash Group, and Launch of our Chapbook by the same name
  Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 7:00-8:30pm
  At the Foy House,
  92 Isabella Street, Toronto


• 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.

© copyright 2013   Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes   Email