We’re so pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, as chosen by judge Katherena Vermette.
Congrats to Colleen, Cody, and Lou!
Grand Prize
“The Spring of Grade Nine” by Colleen Baran
Colleen Baran is a Canadian artist, designer, and writer. Baran’s artwork has exhibited in museums and galleries in eleven countries and been published in a few more. Her poem-poems and visual-poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, Always Crashing, New Delta Review, Midterm, Room, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2019.
She stopped writing after losing most of her poems in a big move. She started again after an extended illness with long periods of time spent lying very still and flat in bed. She loves words and language and experimenting with form.
Photo credit: Kris Caetano
First Runner-up
“why the sex addict is a porkchop preteNDN” by Cody Caetano
Cody Caetano’s work has appeared in Beatroute, Bad Nudes, Hart House Review, and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, Pleasure Dome Poems, was released by Knife/Fork/Book in 2019. He has an MA in English in the field of creative writing from the University of Toronto, where he wrote a memoir under the mentorship of Lee Maracle, called Half-bads in White Regalia.
Cody currently is represented by Stephanie Sinclair of the Transatlantic Agency. He is a member of Pinaymootang First Nation and the Bloorcourt neighbourhood in Toronto, the latter of which is where he currently lives with his two cats. Find him at @cody_caetano.
Second Runner-up
“what’s your bodypolitik?” by Lou Garcia-Dolnik
Lou Garcia-Dolnik is a mixed-race Filipinx-Australian writer, editor and harpist working on unceded Gadigal Land. Their work meditates on language as a matrix of colonial violence, this living within and through the archive; words, sentences and diagnoses. They were a 2019 Toolkits: Poetry participant and have been a member of the poetry cohort at the Banff Centre’s Emerging Writers Intensive. Currently editing poetry for Voiceworks, their work has previously been published in Voiceworks and Scum Mag.
Please join us in congratulating our shortlist, longlist, and these three top winners!
Katherena writes of the longlist: “I wish I could make the long list longer, or could somehow spread the ‘win’ around. These are all poems and poets I want to hear aloud. I want to close my eyes to the voices and let them wash over me like medicine, like all good poems do. Each one of these long-listed beauties is their own individual unit of love and meaning, so worthy of being read and discovered, as are all their makers.”
Our next contest, the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, closes on January 31.