We are so very honoured to announce the winners of the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize 2018. Please meet our wonderful winners as selected by judge Billy-Ray Belcourt. Read his judging essay in our upcoming issue 57.3 where you will also find the three winning poems. Please join us in congratulating all three poets!!
Winner
CROSS-SECTIONS OF SEQUOIA SEMPERVIRENS & SHELLS, 2013 – syan jay, Brighton, MA, USA
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syan jay is a nonbinary, Dzil Łigai Si’an N’dee (White Mountain Apache) cyberbrat who lives on invaded Nipmuc/Massachusett/Wampanoag land. They are a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. syan jay’s writing examines narratives of displacement, queerness, sex, kinship, and illness. Their debut poetry collection “Bury Me in Thunder” is forthcoming with Sundress Publications in late 2019. When they are not writing, syan jay serves their local community as a mental health counselor specializing in trauma work.
1st Runner up
a simple instruction- Tara McGowan-Ross, Montreal, QC
Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaq writer and multidisciplinary artist from Toronto, Halifax, or Montreal, depending on her mood.The child of musicians, she grew up surrounded by art. At Concordia University, she was creative director and then collective member at Spectra Journal, an LGBTQ+ arts and letters magazine, before she graduated from the philosophy program with a minor in creative writing in 2016. Her debut collection of poetry, Girth, was published by Insomniac Press in 2016. She lives in Montreal, where she writes for a living, produces arts events, and regularly runs away to plant trees in BC.
2nd Runner-Up
pahpowin – Samantha Nock, Vancouver, BC
Samantha is a Cree-Métis writer and poet from Northeast BC (Treaty 8 Territory). Her family originally comes from Ile-a-la-Crosse (Sakitawak), Saskatchewan. She has been published in Canadian Art, Shameless Magazine, SAD Mag, GUTS Magazine, Prism International, and others. Samantha is host to the monthly podcast, Heavy Content, and also co-organizes a bimonthly community reading series called Poetry is Bad For You. Sam has had to momentarily pause her life as she attends an intensive web development ‘bootcamp’, she will be finished in Spring 2019. She cares about radical decolonial love, coffee, corgis, and her two cats, Betty and Jughead.
About Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. candidate and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta; he is at work on a creative-theoretical project called “The Conspiracy of NDN Joy.” He is also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders.
Billy-Ray’s debut book of poems, This Wound is a World (Frontenac House 2017), won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize (making him the youngest winner ever) and the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. It was also named the Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Awards. This Wound is a World was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, the 2018 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the 2018 Raymond Souster Award, both of the latter via the Canadian League of Poets. It was also named by CBC Books as the best “Canadian poetry” collection of 2017. U.S. (University of Minnesota Press) and French (Groupe Nota Bene) editions of the book are forthcoming in 2019.