5 writers make the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist
Read their poems now!
Writers Cicely Grace, Emily Yiling Ma, Rachel Robb, Eleonore Schönmaier and Catherine St. Denis have made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist.
Their nominated works are:
- There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen by Cicely Grace (Vancouver)
- 吃苦 (Eat the Bitterness) by Emily Yiling Ma (Burnaby, B.C.)
- Palimpsest County by Rachel Robb (Toronto)
- Northern Childhood by Eleonore Schönmaier (Ketch Harbour, N.S.)
- The Killer and the Harpist by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
The winner will be announced on Nov. 21. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
The remaining four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.
All five finalists had their entries published on CBC Books. You can read their works by clicking on the links above.
The longlist was selected from more than 2,700 submissions. Submissions are processed by a two-tiered system: the initial submissions are screened by a reading committee chosen for each category from a group of qualified editors and writers across the country. Each entry is read by two readers.
The readers come up with a preliminary list of approximately 100 submissions that are then forwarded to a second reading committee. It is this committee who will decide upon the 30 entries that comprise the longlist that is forwarded to the jury.
The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin.
Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style. For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.
The shortlist for the French-language competition has also been revealed. To read more, go to the Prix de la création Radio-Canada.
Last year's winner was Kyo Lee for her poem lotus flower blooming into breasts.
If you're interested in other writing competitions, check out the CBC Literary Prizes. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January and the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April. The CBC Short Story Prize will open in September.
Get to know the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize English-language finalists below.
There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen by Cicely Grace
Cicely Grace is a 24-year-old writer based in Vancouver. She holds a degree in English literature from the University of British Columbia, where she specialized in feminism, sexuality and modernist women's writing. Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, The Garden Statuary, The Foundationalist and Pulp Literature.
She was awarded second place in the Foster Poetry Prize and first runner up in the Magpie Award for Poetry. Her influences include Anais Nin, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Clarice Lispector and Virginia Woolf.
Why she wrote There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen: "It took me nearly a decade to heal from the experience of being 14 and I don't believe I am alone in that. I wanted to write a poem that captured this year of humiliating inaugurations, a year that was truly 'a series of exposures.' Fourteen was the year I began to resent my girlhood, to see it as a debilitating curse, something I needed to cure myself of. And because I had begun to look like a woman, people, especially men, began to treat me like one.
"What's more, it seemed like they were daring me to prove it, to prove I wasn't just a naive little girl. There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen was born out of an attempt to reanimate that girl in her ponytail and first-job uniform, to put her experiences on a page in order to heal her of them.
Fourteen was the year I began to resent my girlhood, to see it as a debilitating curse, something I needed to cure myself of.- Cicely Grace
"For me, writing and reading are means of exorcism. I have never found a more thorough method of dispelling pain, or of making pain useful. Once I was finally able to tell this story to myself, to face what it looked like on a page, I wanted to put it out in the world so that it could resonate with others.
"I believe it is a rare thing for a girl to escape adolescence without experiencing someone's attempt at degrading them, humiliating them, sexualizing them. My hope is that it resonates with women and anyone whose memories of adolescence are touched by these things."
吃苦 (Eat the Bitterness) by Emily Yiling Ma
Emily Yiling Ma (she/her) is a queer, Chinese-Canadian undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University pursuing a BA in English. She is a Hui Chinese settler on the unceded and occupied lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her writing and artistic practices focus on diaspora, migration, language and language loss and manifestations of queerness and family lineages.
Why she wrote 吃苦 (Eat the Bitterness): "My relationship with my grandmother has always been punctuated by varying degrees of tension and warmth, tenderness and distance, accompanied by my slow loss of language and ability to communicate with her. My intent was to explore my grandmother's life in Canada and explore the superstitions and beliefs she's held over the years.
"The initial drafts of this poem were more focused purely on superstition and later drafts led me back to thinking about my family lineage and the ways in which these superstitions have been passed down. I wanted to look at the ways my grandmother's fears, beliefs and constructions of femininity have been passed down generationally, with her belief that women should hold onto their burdens and accept suffering on behalf of the family — a term mirrored through the idea of 吃苦.
I wanted to look at the ways my grandmother's fears, beliefs, and constructions of femininity have been passed down generationally.- Emily Yiling Ma
"My poem wants to know my grandmother better, and to be able to hold her with more closeness as she reaches the end of her life despite our cultural and emotional distances. Our relationship grew more distant as we no longer knew how to fall into the roles we once occupied: her as caretaker, and me as child, with our roles now somewhat reversed in her old age.
"Her sole identity had been crafted around her maternal abilities and this too has been stripped away from her."
Palimpsest County by Rachel Robb
Rachel Robb is a Tkaronto (Toronto)-based writer and educator of Jamaican Irish Canadian heritage. Her poetry has been featured as a finalist in the Bridport Prize anthology and shortlisted for The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, the VC International Poetry Prize (longlist), and most recently, the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
Her work has also appeared in anthologies for Hamilton's gritLit Festival and The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story, where she placed first and second, respectively. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, she is currently working on her first collection of poetry.
Why she wrote Palimpsest County: "I was inspired by the contradictory layers of small-town Ontario history. The image of a palimpsest resonated with me as a metaphor for resistance; despite constant attempts at erasure through time, open hostility and commercialization of land, the presence of Indigenous people endures.
I wanted to explore the internal breaking open that must occur within a settler on this land before reconciliation can begin.- Rachel Robb
"Mostly, I wanted to explore the internal breaking open that must occur within a settler on this land before reconciliation can begin. This rupture takes different forms for different people; for some, it never happens.
"For the narrator of this poem — an outsider, an immigrant — she attempts to situate herself on this shifting landscape. Ultimately, it is the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world that begins to shape her role in reconciliation."
- Read Palimpsest County
Northern Childhood by Eleonore Schönmaier
Eleonore Schönmaier's latest collection is Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete. Wavelengths of Your Song was published in German as part of the Frankfurt Bookfair translation program. Dust Blown Side of the Journey was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards (Greece). She has won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, the National Broadsheet Contest and the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize (second place).
Her poetry has been widely anthologized in the U.S. and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry. Multiple Canadian and international composers have set her poems to music.
Why she wrote Northern Childhood: "The poems are part of a long sequence that I've been working on for many years based on my childhood.
"Knowing that writers I admire will be reading my work adds additional focus to my writing process."
- Read Northern Childhood
The Killer and the Harpist by Catherine St. Denis
Catherine St. Denis (she/her) lives, writes, sings, teaches, and parents on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples in Victoria. Her work recently appeared in Rattle, The Malahat Review, Grain, Arc, Canthius, and The Humber Literary Review. She was shortlisted for The Far Horizons Award for Poetry, The Fiddlehead's Poetry Prize, The Toronto Arts and Letters Club Poetry Award and The Foster Poetry Prize. Catherine was a finalist for PEN Canada's New Voices Award in both 2022 and 2023. Her work is featured in Biblioasis' Best Canadian Poetry 2025.
St. Denis is on the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist twice: for The Killer and the Harpist and Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile: Like Butterscotch.
Why she wrote The Killer and the Harpist: "Recently, I have been working on a collection of poetry that explores the loss of my daughter's father to a fentanyl overdose and the loss of my own father to alcoholic dementia. These topics are very dark, of course, but one theme that keeps emerging is the role that art in all its forms can play in allowing us to access the beauty in everything — even loss, even betrayal. How can music (or the music that is poetry) help us to transform our grief? What remains to be reckoned with after that transformation has occurred?
How can music (or the music that is poetry) help us to transform our grief?- Catherine St. Denis
"Each year, I marvel at the quality of the writing that rises to the top of the CBC Literary Prizes. I wanted to try my chance at joining the ranks of the gifted wordsmiths who place in this most quintessential of Canadian writing contests."
