Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips is a Barbadian poet, teacher, and editor. In 2018, she was named the first Poet Laureate of Barbados. 

Starting to write at an early age, Phillips published her first poetry in the literary magazine BIM, a pioneer in Caribbean literature journalism. In 1999, she obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami and was awarded the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her thesis poetry collection. Since 2007, she has been the editor of Bim—Arts for the 21st Century (renamed), which was founded by her long-term partner George Lamming. In a shared effort with the Writers Ink Inc. collective, which she had founded, Phillips created the Bim Literary Festival and Book Fair, and a corresponding children's literature festival, in 2012. 

Esther Phillips has published four poetry collections and one chapbook, the most recent of which are Witness in Stone (2021) and Leaving Atlantis (2015), the last of which was dedicated to George Lamming. Her work has also been published in many anthologies and has been featured on the reading lists of several universities. 

Esther Phillips’s poetry is influenced by her Christian faith and her childhood in the countryside. It carries a personal tone as it observes an internal world. She expresses herself in layered but uncomplicated language, reflecting not only her inner world but also entering that of her audience. By doing this, Phillips aims to provide a space for sharing deep feelings that were previously unexpressed, thereby paving “a path towards healing”.  The themes in her work, such as love, grief, memory, and the absent father, are universal, but also relate to Caribbean folk culture and the country’s history of colonialism. 

Esther Phillips has taught at several colleges and universities as well as in the Barbadian prison system. She has served on the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Committee and, in 2023, received a Visiting Fellowship as Poet in Residence from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) University of London for the purpose of researching the experiences of enslaved women from Africa to the Caribbean. She has been a leading advocate for reparations in Barbados, in relation to which TIME magazine has featured her work as well. In 2023, The Order of the Republic of Barbados (OR) was conferred on her.