For Trinidadian author Simone Dalton, the desire to go into full-time writing emerged from grief, when her mother, Esther Dalton, died in 2010.
“She died while in Trinidad and I was in Toronto. I felt very destabilised when she died. I grew up in a single parent home and we were very close, so when she passed, I felt very untethered. What happens next? What do I do now? Who am I and who am I becoming?”
So she decided to start writing to explore her feelings.
She began attending writing courses after work, working on her ideas, and re-igniting the love for writing she first formed in secondary school. She also wanted to delve into the writing community in Toronto, so she applied to do a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
She left her job in public relations to go into the programme and graduated in 2018.
[caption id="attachment_997078" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (L-R) Poet, journalist and broadcaster, Clifton Joseph; fiction writer, Téa Mutonji and writer Simone Dalton in conversation at A Different Booklist Cultural Centre (now called The Blackhurst Cultural Centre) event in Toronto, in 2019. Photo courtesy Simone Dalton. -[/caption]
“During that programme I had such a vast experience and opportunity to connect with other writers who were looking at writing as a career and build a life as a writer. It also gave me a chance to dip my toes into other forms of writing other than prose.”
There, she met and was mentored for her thesis by Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand. She learned from the acclaimed author and started to figure out her own story.
After graduating, she returned to PR for another year before moving to Boston where she has been working on her writing and teaching.
She was an adjunct professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and has been an instructor at a literary arts centre, GrubStreet, since 2020. And, she has been a full-time writer for three years, working on building her career writing non-fiction and memoir pieces.
So far, her work has been published in the anthologies Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, The Unpublished City: Volume I, and ARC Poetry Magazine’s Islands of Influence issue.
[caption id="attachment_997079" align="aligncenter" width="324"] Book cover of the anthology, Watch Your Head, to which Simone Dalton contributed. -[/caption]
She was a finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards and was the recipient of the 2020 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction. Also, in 2019, her inaugural short play, VOWS, was debuted at Soulpepper as part of RARE Theatre's production, Welcome to My Underworld.
Now, at age 41, she is working on her first book, a memoir.
Dalton said through all her literally experiences, she has been meeting very few writers who look and sound like her.
“Writing at a professional level is another industry that has been white-centric and sort of closed off to people of colour, in term
