John Barton first heard of The Malahat Review while studying poetry with the magazine’s co-founder, Robin Skelton, in the late 1970s. In the years since, he has published nine books of poems, the most recent being Hymn (Brick, 2009). His tenth, a selected poems, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in 2012. His work has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, a Patricia Hackett Prize, a CBC Literary Award, and a National Magazine Award. His personal reading has taken him from Margaret Atwood to Erín Moure to Daryl Hine to Alice Oswald and back again, with tangents leading him to fiction by Oscar Wilde, Alice Munro, Alan Hollinghurst, Elizabeth Hay, David Leavitt, Sarah Schulman, Michael Ondaatje, Truman Capote, David Adams Richards, Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Mavis Gallant, and Colm Tóibín.  He’s also very partial to Annie Dillard. Co-editor of Ottawa-based Arc Poetry Magazine for thirteen years and editor of Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada for two years, he became editor of The Malahat Review in 2004.

Photo credit: Holly Pattison.