Simone
Dalton
Simone Dalton is an author, creative writing instructor, and the recipient of the 2020 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work is anthologized in Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, and The Unpublished City: Volume I. In 2019, her play “VOWS” was produced for RARE Theatre’s Welcome to My Underworld, and in 2020, her essay, “Wait of Grief,” was on the longlisted for Room Magazine’s Creative Non-Fiction Prize. She was selected for the 2021 Writers’ Trust Mentorship by nonfiction writer Jenny Heijun Wills. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Simone is currently based in Boston.
Program History
Citation
“To me, Simone Dalton’s What Remains, feels like the homecoming it describes in its pages. It is exactly the kind of intellectually aesthetic work that makes me feel like I’m returning somewhere I can live. It is at once a reflection of remarkable literary talent, political acumen, and skillful revelation. The writing bespeaks Dalton’s artistic curiosity as she layers that which is relatable (the death of a parent) with that which is unique to her subject’s remarkable journey (navigating kinship across geographic and emotional distances). Every moment reveals precise consideration of character and story. Lives are portrayed as simultaneously simple and complicated, controlled and messy, and I was left with the ugly-beautiful reminder of how family and love often reveal themselves when we’re not looking.”
— 2021 WT Literary Nonfiction Mentor Jenny Heijun Wills