BIOGRAPHY
Margo Wheaton is an award-winning poet and editor and is the author of Rags of Night in Our Mouths (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) and Wild Green Light (with David Adams Richards, Pottersfield Press, 2021). She lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the traditional and ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Her debut poetry collection The Unlit Path Behind the House (McGill-Queen’s, 2016) won the Fred Kerner Award (Canadian Authors’ Association) for Book of the Year and the Alfred G. Bailey Award from the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. It was also shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the J.M. Abraham Award, the Fred Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, and the Relit Award.

Margo holds a Masters degree in English and a Certificate in Adult Education, both from Dalhousie University. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, the Guernica Series on Writers, Pottersfield Portfolio, The Antigonish Review and The Coast.

Her poetry has appeared in magazines and literary journals across the country including The Literary Review of Canada, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Prism International. Her poems have been set to choral music and performed at the University of Toronto.

Comments about Rags of Night in Our Mouths (McGill-Queen’s, 2022):

”Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a haunting masterpiece of intimate negotiation. Harnessing all powers of the senses, these poems reach out to feel their way through darkened rooms, wild weather, and lost landscapes of the past and present. This is an unforgettable performance, and perhaps the most viscerally honest book of poetry to come out of Atlantic Canada in the last decade.” – Alexander MacLeod, author of Animal Person and Light Lifting 

”Margo Wheaton’s poetry of brooding hours and raw intensities is polished by phrasing of rare precision. In places both outer and inner, we hear a ‘primal/speech of branches clanking’ and learn that ‘family’s/an old night, its chaos Miltonic.’ Readers will find themselves riveted, their lives expanded by this strong-hearted book packed with truthfulness, tenderness, and music.” – Brian Bartlett, author of Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal