Barbara Myers

Barbara Myers grew up in Halifax's North End, and worked at odd jobs to help put herself through school. She was a reporter for the Halifax Mail-Star and Chronicle-Herald and a writer-researcher for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women and the LeDain Inquiry into Non-Medical Drug Use, before settling into many years of communications consulting for the government in Toronto and Ottawa.

Since the late 1990s, Myers has published widely in journals and anthologies, and has won literary prizes including Other Voices (first place, 2000) as well as Arc's Poem of the Year (HM, in 2006). For six years, she worked as an associate editor at Arc, Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, to which she continues to contribute reviews and essays. She has published a number of chapbooks, both her own and collections compiled from the work of students in a poetry group she facilitates. A community activist, she lives in Ottawa, where she regularly volunteers for the Ottawa International Writers' Festival.