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“Unwritten Poem” by Esther Phillips, Barbados/Caribbean Region, Barbados’ First Poet Laureate Esther Phillips, Caribbean Poetry, Human Relationships, Mother/Son-in-law relationship, The Stone Gatherer by Esther Phillips
Minister of Culture appoints Poet Esther Phillips as Barbados’ first Poet Laureate – February 2018
Photo Credit: Barbados Government Information Services
My Poetry Corner January 2019 features the poem “Unwritten Poem” from the poetry collection, The Stone Gatherer, by Esther Phillips, a poet and educator born in Barbados, where she still resides. In February 2018, she was appointed the first Poet Laureate of the Caribbean island-nation.
After attending the Barbados Community College at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, she won a James Michener fellowship to the University of Miami where, in 1999, she gained an MFA degree in Creative Writing. Her poetry collection/thesis won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets.
In 2001, she won the leading Barbadian Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award. Years later, the third of her three well-received poetry collections, Leaving Atlantis (2015), won the Governor General’s Award for Literary Excellence.
Phillips is a Sunday columnist of the Nation newspaper and editor of Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, a 2007 revival of the seminal Caribbean literary and arts magazine, first published in 1942. In 2012, she formed Writers Ink Inc. and, together with its members, the Bim Literary Festival & Book Fair. Continue reading
