Zilla Jones has made the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Thin Blue Line.

The winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to 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 April 21 and the winner will be announced on April 28.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31.

Zilla Jones is a mixed-race African-Canadian criminal defence lawyer, anti-racism educator, singer and writer based in Winnipeg. She has won fiction contests organized by the Malahat Review, PRISM International, Freefall and GritLit festival. She was the runner-up in the Puritan's Austin Clarke competition, second place in Prairie Fire's Fiction Contest and an honourable mention in Room's 2020 Fiction Contest. Her writing appears in these publications as well as in the Fiddlehead and in Bayou Magazine. She has finished work on her first novel, The World So Wide, about the traumatic fallout of the 1983 United States invasion of Grenada in the Caribbean. She was longlisted for the 2020 Short Story Prize for Our Father.

"Stand up and be counted."

"This is one of many stories that flew out of me in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, as I reflected on justice and policing. The ancestors gifted me with the story of a white-passing police officer with Black heritage who is forced to question his loyalties. It was inspired by my personal experiences with people I know and my daily drive past the RCMP building with the statue described in the opening paragraph, which was vandalised by the public during the railway blockades of early 2020."

They had targeted the statue again. Its bronze body was painted with red swastikas and the word "Killer" written over and over again in blue. Mark winced as he gave the statue — known as Bubba — a pat on the shoulder. In his mind, Bubba stood on guard for every cop who went through the doors of the RCMP building. Forever young and slim in his dress uniform, his iron hat shading his metal eyes as he looked out to Portage Avenue, Bubba stood firm.

The winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story 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 2022 CBC Poetry Prize is currently open for submissions until May 31, 2022. The 2023 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2023.