Michelle Porter has made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize for Slicing Lemons in April.

Michelle Porter is a Métis writer who has called Newfoundland and Labrador home for almost 10 years now. She is currently studying creative writing, teaching journalism and is involved in a research. She holds a BA in journalism and communications, an MA in folklore and a PhD in geography. She was selected for the longlist for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize and has been published in The Malahat Review. She was a winner of the 2017 Arts and Letters Award, Senior Poetry category. This year, she won funding from ArtsNL to create a poetry manuscript about the mobile, overlapping, historical and contemporary meanings of Métis home.

Moving toward home

"Home is a complicated place. Really, even trying to settle on a definition of home is almost impossible because each person's home is radically different from anyone else's. I studied the critical geographies of home as they are narrated in rural Newfoundland and Labrador during my PhD studies. This new series of poems is a creative expression of that academic research. This poetry project is a way to explore my own personal geographies of home. I am focusing on the different ways that being Métis and being globally connected are implicated in my home(s)."

Tucked in
the bed of a truck lurching down the
highway—my sister and I, limbs
knotted

with the
sky we called our Grandmother. She watched over us,
her starred eyes fierce as she told us half-moon
stories.