Mallory Tater
Author and Creative Writing Instructor
“Tater’s stylistic voice paints a vivid portrait of a child growing into her womanhood and dealing with what that means.”
— Jemicah Colleen Marasigan, This Magazine.
“These poems unfold as stories girls tell each other as they make space to share, cope, grieve, and hopefully, heal.”
— Dina Del Bucchia, author of Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items and Don’t Tell Me What to Do.
About
Mallory Tater
Mallory Tater is the author of four books: This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), Lockers are for Bearcats Only: Poems (Palimpsest 2026) & Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing.
Books
Lockers Are for Bearcats Only
Poems
The poems in Mallory Tater’s Lockers Are for Bearcats Only spill out from the confluence of grief and water. After losing one of her closest friends, the poet began swimming laps–part meditation, part therapy, part escapism–immersed in the depths of the public pool. There, she found herself haunted by the strange tension between fitness / surrender and memory / motion where ghosts of girlhood, catholicism, and addiction rose to the surface. These themes haunt Lockers Are for Bearcats Only – a tender, unguarded exploration of loss, embodiment, and the currents that carry us through life with and without those who shaped us.
“The poems in Lockers Are for Bearcats Only move with the colloquial grace and ongoingness of everyday conversation. Mallory Tater tours us through the charged terrain of girlhood and its afterlives, where girls bleed facepaint, teens starve and hunger, and the friends that define our youth don’t always survive adulthood itself. Here is an elegiac mode rooted in the textures of lived time: a Stuff by Duff keychain, a cloud of Ariana Grande perfume, oversalted rice, bright yellow nail polish, the Zeller’s diner. These details accumulate until absence becomes legible by its outline. Tater’s poems render the ordinary sacred, the sacred suspect, and offer the reader a moving testament to friendship, loss, and the body as the containers we carry forward.”
— Domenica Martinello – Author of Good Want
This Will Be Good
Poetry
Mallory Tater’s This Will Be Good, published with Book*Hug Press, tells the story of a young woman’s burgeoning femininity as it brushes up against an emerging eating disorder. As the difficulties of her disease reveal themselves, they ultimately disrupt family relationships and friendships.
These poems deftly bear witness to the performance of femininity and gender construction to reveal the shrinking mind and body of a girl trying to find her place in the world, and whose overflowing adolescent hope for a future will not subside.
“Evocative and tactile as unearthed memory, This Will Be Good follows the history of a family through years, homes, seasons, and bodies. They’re death and grief, sex and religion. A reckoning with womanhood, manhood, and memory, these stories have a feeling of being passed down, kept secret, and slipped in notes and gestures between intimates whose closeness is felt on the skin. Press these words to your breast.”
— Sarah Gerard, Author of Binary Star and Sunshine State.
The Birth Yard
A novel
A debut novel for readers of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Girls, The Birth Yard is a gripping story of a young woman’s rebellion against the rules that control her body.
Sable Ursu has just turned eighteen, which means she is ready to breed. Within the confines of her world, a patriarchal cult known as the Den, female fertility and sexuality are wholly controlled by Men. In the season they come of age, Sable and her friends Mamie and Dinah are each paired with a Match with the purpose of conceiving a child. Sable is paired with Ambrose, the son of a favoured Man in the Den. Others are not so lucky.
In their second trimester, girls are sent to the Birth Yard, where they are prepared for giving birth and motherhood, but are also regularly drugged and monitored by their midwives. Sable is unable to ignore her unease about the pills they are forced to swallow and the punishments they receive for stepping out of line. Too many of the girls, including Mamie and Dinah, have secrets and it is impossible to know whom to trust. When Sable’s loyalty is questioned and her safety within the Den is threatened, she must rebel against the only life she has ever known—the only life she has been designed for.
“With enough exquisite detail to draw a provocative landscape paired with fast-paced action, The Birth Yard had me up all night. Mallory Tater has build an intricate and devious world and then walked us directly into the middle of it. Thankfully, she has also given us the strong and conflicted Sable Ursu to walk us back out.”
— Cherie Dimaline, Author of The Marrow Thieves & Empire of Wild.
Teaching
Lecturer
University of British Columbia, School of Creative Writing
MALLORY TATER 