John Barton is a poet, essayist, editor, and writing mentor. His books include For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, Polari, Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, and The Essential Douglas LePan, which won a 2020 eLit Award. In 2020, he published Lost Family: A Memoir (a book of sonnets) with Signal Editions and edited The Essential Derk Wynand for The Porcupine’s Quill. He lives in Victoria, BC, where he is the city’s first queer poet laureate.
His poem “What We Live For” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/what-we-live-for/.
Canadian Literature issue 242, Emerging Scholars, Redux, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.