In Memoriam The League of Canadian Poets has a large community that has stood strong for over 50 years. Over these past few months, the League has lost members and friends from the poetry community. We’d like to take this chance to remember Daniel David Moses and Barbara Myers. Barbara Myers Barbara Myers grew up in Halifax’s North End, and worked at odd jobs to help put herself through school. She was a reporter for the Halifax Mail-Star and Chronicle-Herald and a writer-researcher for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women and the LeDain Inquiry into Non-Medical Drug Use, before settling into many years of communications consulting for the government in Toronto and Ottawa. Since the late 1990s, Myers had published widely in journals and anthologies, and had won literary prizes including Other Voices (first place, 2000) as well as Arc’s Poem of the Year (HM, in 2006). For six years, she worked as an associate editor at Arc, Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, to which
she continued to regularly contribute reviews and essays. She had published a number of chapbooks, both her own and collections compiled from the work of students in a poetry group she facilitated. A community activist, she lived in Ottawa, where she regularly volunteered for the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival. Barbara passed away on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2020 after a lengthy and heroic battle with cancer. She was art, love, passion, beauty and intelligence. Born a Roberts (Cashmore) of father Lawrence Ernest and Jean Muriel (Nickerson) in North Halifax, Nova Scotia, she earned scholarships, quickly excelled academically and began a professional and artistic career in communications. The art and beauty of the written word, created or consumed, was an integral part of Barbara’s identity and life journey. A journalist, teacher, philosopher, public servant, volunteer, editor and published poet were some of the mantels she wore, all tempered with her strong advocacy for justice, fairness, respect
