Anne Baldo has made the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Expecting.

Anne Baldo lives in Windsor, Ont. Her short fiction has been published in SubTerrain, Qwerty, Broken Pencil, The Humber Literary Review and The Impressment Gang. She was a finalist for The Malahat Review's 2019 Open Season Awards in fiction.

"A pregnancy ends unexpectedly."

"In 2013, our son was born three months early. Before that, I had no idea how common prematurity was, or how life changing. A few years later, I read about Martin Couney and his incubator sideshows. It sounded sensationalistic, but he was credited with helping save the lives of thousands of premature babies."

"Saturday night," I read the words to my husband. "It says in this book that if the baby was born now, today, at 25 weeks, it would receive steroid shots to accelerate its lung growth." I share this like an interesting fact, random, impersonal: like how oysters make pearls from their pain or only Venus rotates clockwise or how insects never sleep. They have a state called torpor, caused by shock or fear, cold temperatures, the loss of something they need. Frozen, they doze, conserving themselves."

The winner of the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 18, 2019. The winner will be announced on Sept. 25, 2019.