Shauntay Grant

Shauntay Grant is a poet, playwright, interdisciplinary artist, and children’s author who lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was it’s third poet laureate. With ancestral ties to the arrival of Black Loyalists, Jamaican Maroons, and Black Refugees in Nova Scotia in the late 1700s and early 1800s, her work is deeply informed by African Nova Scotian and diasporic histories and experiences.

A former poet laureate for the City of Halifax, she creates work that is engaging and accessible while also rigorous, research-driven, and formally inventive. She is a member of The Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and a recipient of numerous honors, including a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Writing and Publishing, a Robert Merritt Award for her play The Bridge, a Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award for Africville (with illustrator Eva Campbell), and a Poet of Honour prize from the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.

Grant is co-founder of the Erasure Art Collective, an interdisciplinary arts group dedicated to reinterpreting archival texts through visual, poetic, and performative erasure practices. Her work has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Quill & Quire, and the Canadian Review of Materials.

Recent publications include the children’s picture book When I Wrap My Hair (with illustrator Jenin Mohammed), the stage play Beyere (featured in Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures anthology), and the edited collection From the Ashes (Playwrights Canada Press, 2023).