I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet. — Bob Dylan

Debra (she/her) is a writer, poet, and photographer, as well as HSP (highly sensitive person, also defined as SPS), walker/runner, dog lover, and Librarian. She writes lyric and narrative poems, nature poems, queer poems, social justice poems, and street-involved poems. She has her MA (Creative Writing and English Literature) and her BA Honours in Psychology. She has one published chapbook “Where the Back Roads Take You.” She’s been published in several Canadian literary magazines including The Fiddlehead, Event, Prairie Fire, and The Dalhousie Review, and she’s working on a new chapbook and poetry collection.

I have been writing poems for as long as I can remember. I first started my career working with youth facing emotional and mental health struggles. From there, I joined a community rehab team for adults with Acquired Brain Injuries, until I changed directions, and followed my dreams of writing and moving my life to the East Coast for several years. This was the beginning of a journey of finding out who I was, as a writer and seeker of voice, story, authenticity, and truth, and connecting with those who have felt excluded, unloved, and abandoned. After taking poetry courses at York University and Trent University, I continued studying poetry and writing at the University of New Brunswick in the Maritimes.

Currently, I work as a Librarian in Ontario and stay very involved with the many beautiful street-involved humans who have changed me from the inside out, and always for the better. There has been much grief and so much love, which often shows up in my poems. I believe social justice and poems can be one and the same. I continue to advocate for those struggling with mental illness, poverty, homelessness, addiction, trauma, and social isolation. I also advocate for harm reduction = love. Poems allow us to see with magnified attention what is right in front of us, but which we might not have noticed otherwise. My passion lies in creative and artistic expression, and especially where these intersect with those who are marginalized and forgotten. I believe we are connected and transformed through the language we speak. When given voice, we rise from the depths.

I have come to understand language as transformative, the energy that draws us towards closer attention — to the parts of the world that break our hearts, and the parts that put our hearts back together in deeper and more complex ways and almost undefinable and inarticulate ways. Sometimes poems are the best way to articulate that which cannot be spoken.