Gail MacKay has made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for A Collection of Sky Stories.

Gail MacKay is an Anishinaabe-Métis woman from the Robinson Superior Treaty area who lives in Saskatoon and works as an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the College of Education. She has learned to appreciate the meaning of family and belonging and is ever grateful for the teachings of her ancestors. She defended her dissertation, Finding Indigenous Discourse Survivance and Sending it Forward, in the spring of 2017.

Love poems for Saskatchewan sons.

"These poems were inspired by my love for my sons in moments of awe and gratitude contained by the expanse and comfort of the Saskatchewan sky. Our boys, whom we adopted at birth and age two, have made visible to me the connection made by the love and devotion of birth and adoptive families, our ancestors and an abiding land rootedness and sky orientation."

under an indigo sky
prayers drifted aloft
through cool night air

and still

for so long
the moon song
seemed to hold itself

above and beyond