Meet the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize readers
Every year, the CBC Literary Prizes enlists the help of established writers and editors from across the country to help us discover some of Canada's greatest writers.
Our readers compile the longlist, which is given to the jury. The jury then selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlisted selections.
The 2019 CBC Poetry Prize winner was Alycia Pirmohamed for her collection of poems Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih.
Jonathan Ball
Jonathan Ball is an author of dark, experimental artworks. He holds a PhD in creative writing and is the author of numerous books, including Ex Machina, poetry about how machines have changed what it means to be human, Clockfire, 77 plays that would be impossible to produce, The Politics of Knives, which won a Manitoba Book Award, and The National Gallery. Ball also published John Paizs's Crime Wave. Ball has directed short films including Spoony B, which sold to The Comedy Network, served as the managing editor of Dandelion magazine and founded the literary journal Maelstrom. In 2014, he won the John Hirsch Award for most promising Manitoba Writer.
Ali Blythe
Ali Blythe is the author of two critically acclaimed books exploring trans-poetics: Twoism and Hymnswitch. Blythe's poems and essays are published in literary journals and anthologies throughout Canada, England, Germany and Slovenia.
Carol Rose GoldenEagle
Carol Rose GoldenEagle is the author of Bearskin Diary. The novel received the 2017 First Nation Communities Read Award and was shortlisted for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. The French-language translation, Peau d'ours, won a Saskatchewan Book Award in 2019. Her first book of poetry, Hiraeth, was shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award in 2019. Her second novel, Bone Black, came out in fall 2019.
Chantal Gibson
Chantal Gibson is an artist-educator from Vancouver working in the overlap between literary and visual art. Her debut book of poetry, How She Read, was published in January 2019. This collection blends art, literature, history and pop culture, forging new spaces that challenge and celebrate representations of black womanhood across the Canadian cultural imagination. Named one of CBC's top 6 black Canadian writers to watch in 2019, Gibson is an award-winning teacher in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Domenica Martinello
Domenica Martinello is a writer from Montreal and is the author of the poetry collection All Day I Dream about Sirens. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Poetry. Most recently, her poem Parthenope & Virgil was anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2019.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being, which was a finalist for the 2019 City of Vancouver Book Award, 2019 BC Book Prizes's Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Quill & Quire, Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and Maisonneuve. CBC Books named her as a writer to watch and listed Port of Being as one of the best Canadian poetry books of 2018. She is a columnist for Open Book and is currently at work on a novel.
Armand Garnet Ruffo
Armand Garnet Ruffo was born and raised in the remote town of Chapleau, northern Ontario, and is a member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial roots to the Sagamok Ojibwe First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. As an educator, he is currently the Queen's National Scholar in Indigenous languages and literatures at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. He has published widely and has read from his work nationally and internationally. In 2016, he was honoured with a Life Membership Award by the national council of the League of Canadian Poets for his contribution to Canadian poetry.
John Elizabeth Stinzi
John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary poet and novelist who was raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. They won the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for emerging writers. Their work has been published (or is forthcoming) in The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. They are the author of the chapbooks The Machete Tourist and Plough Forward the Higgs Field, as well as the novel Vanishing Monuments and the poetry collection Junebat — both of which are forthcoming in 2020.
Gillian Sze
Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers' Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She studied creative writing and English literature at Concordia University and received a PhD in English studies from Université de Montréal. Her first picture book, The Night is Deep and Wide, is a bedtime poem and will be published by Orca Book in 2021. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal where she teaches creative writing and literature.
Arielle Twist
Arielle Twist is a Nehiyaw, two-spirit, trans woman who is creating to reclaim and harness ancestral magic and memories. Originally from George Gordon First Nation, Sask., she is now based in Halifax. She is an author and multidisciplinary artist. Her work has been published by Them, Canadian Art, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, This Magazine and CBC Arts. In 2019 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards and awarded the Arts Nova Scotia Indigenous Artist Recognition Award. Disintegrate/Dissociate is her first collection of poetry.
Matthew Walsh
Matthew Walsh is a queer poet from Nova Scotia whose work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Plenitude, The Temz Review, and is forthcoming in other publications. Their debut collection These are not the potatoes of my youth was published by Goose Lane Editions in 2019. They are currently working on their second book.
Sean Wiebe
Sean Wiebe lives in Charlottetown and is a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island. He is the author of three books of poetry: How Boys Grow Up, Blue Waiting (with Celeste Snowber) and The Zen of Traffic; and two nonfiction books on education: From Narratives of Teaching: Conversations Towards Agency and Authenticity in Education (with Craig MacDonald) and Inside the Classroom: Stories of Curriculum and Creativity (with Lori Gard).