Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips (born 1950) is a Barbadian poet. She became the first poet laureate of Barbados in 2018.

Biography Phillips was born in 1950 in Saint George, Barbados, growing up in a village called Greens. She began writing at a young age, publishing her first poem in BIM, the country's main literary magazine, around 1959.

She was educated at St Michael's Girls’ School and Barbados Community College at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill in the early 1970s, part of the first class of students to attend the college. She continued to write poetry in this period, and in 1983 she published her first chapbook, La Monte, through the University of the West Indies.

In the 1990s, Phillips moved to the United States to study at the University of Miami under a James Michener fellowship. She graduated with an MFA in creative writing in 1999, and her thesis poetry collection was awarded the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Leaving Atlantis was dedicated to George Lamming, her longtime partner. Her most recent book is Witness in Stone (2021).

Her work is influenced by her childhood in the countryside and her Christian faith, as well as the country's folk culture and history of colonialism.

She has co-edited the long-standing literary magazine BIM since 2007. After founding the Writers Ink Inc. collective, Phillips and fellow members of the collective created the Bim Literary Festival and Book Fair, and a corresponding children's literature festival, in 2012. and taught for many years at Barbados Community College.

She has been a leader in campaigning for reparations in Barbados, including calling for the island's Drax Hall Estate, a privately owned former plantation, to be converted into a public memorial to the enslaved people who died there.

Selected works

La Montee (chapbook, 1983) When Ground Doves Fly (2003) The Stone Gatherer (2009) Leaving Atlantis (2015) Witness in Stone (2021)