Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. Born and raised in Sudbury, Canada, and homed in Toronto, she is a white settler bisexual poet, writer, image-maker and poetry mentor engaged since the late 80s in an experimental lyric feminist poetics of relationality, direct and indirect address, voice and touch, order and disorder, memory and public listening.

Christakos’s body of work includes twelve collections of poetry, the novel Charisma (2000), and an intergenre memoir Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies (2016). Among her poetry titles are Not Egypt (1989), Other Words for Grace (1994), The Moment Coming (1998), Excessive Love Prostheses (2002), Sooner (2005), What Stirs (2008), Welling (2010), and Multitudes (2013). Chapbooks include Adult Video, The Chips and Ties Study, Retreat Diary 2019 and Social Medea Vs. Virtual Medusa. Selected and introduced by Gregory Betts, Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos was published in 2017 (Laurier Poetry Series). A Chalmers Arts Fellow, she has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and has received the ReLit Award for poetry, ARC Magazine’s Critic’s Desk Award, and the Bliss Carman Award. Her most recent poetry books are charger (Talonbooks, 2020), Dear Birch, (Palimpsest, 2021) and That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Current projects include the constrained poetry manuscript evenness unevenness evanescences, an artbook/manuscript titled To begin in an arena unrecognized as a beginning, and an ongoing photo/social media/text series, #justnow #instantmind.

Her undergraduate focus was in the Visual Arts (B.F.A. York University, 1980–1985). In 1995 she received an M.A. in Education at OISE, University of Toronto. She is a former Fireweed collective member (1991-1994), a co-founder of MIX: The Magazine of Artist-Run Culture, (1995-1997) the producer of PEN Canada’s Readers & Writers program for international exiled writers (2002-2004), and the creator of Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon (2006-2012). A freelance editor and production coordinator for many years, recently she edited Gail Scott’s Permanent Revolution: Essays. She is associate faculty with the MFA program in creative writing at University of Guelph-Humber and, since 1992, has taught Creative Writing as a sessional, often at OCADU, the University of Toronto SCS, and TMU. Margaret has held appointments as Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University, London Public Library, and the University of Alberta. In 2018–2019, she was Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, U of T. In Winter/Spring 2022 she was Poet in Residence at Green College, UBC. She has three adult children and lives in Toronto. Find her on social media or at margaretchristakos.com for more information on her writing, publications, mentoring, events, visual projects and current makings.