Poet Insight - Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips
Born 1950 in Barbados

Phillips’ work is characterized by its faith, a faith in her country, in the poet’s craft, and in ‘the master craftsman’ of Christian belief. 

As Jane King has said of her work in the Caribbean Review of Books, ‘God’s willingness is quietly present in a way that may be possible only in post-colonial spaces, now that the metropolitan academy has become so relentlessly post-Christian’. 

Yet Phillips is keen to stress the influence of what she terms Western Classical Literature, particularly on the technical craft and range of language in Shakespeare, Eliot, and Heaney.

Some Highlights 

• MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami,1999
• Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets
• Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, 2001
• Appointed the first Poet Laureate of Barbados, 2018
• Sunday columnist of the Nation newspaper
• Editor of BIM Magazine
• Artistic Director of BIM Literary Festival & Book Fair
• Founder and Director of Writers Ink Inc. Barbados
• Creator and a senior consultant for the Bridgetown Literary Bus Tour 
• Host and producer of What’s That You’re Reading? (Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation Radio network)

Literary Works

• La Montee (University of West Indies Press, 1983)
• When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers, 2003)
• Poetas de Caribe anglophono (Casa de las Americas, 2011) 
• Give the Ball to the Poet (Cambridge-Homerton, 2014)
• Leaving Atlantis (Peepal Tree Press)
• The Stone Gatherer (Peepal Tree Press, 2009)
• Witness in Stone (Peepal Tree Press)

Sources
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/esther-phillips/
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/esther-phillips