Vancouver's Selina Boan among winners of 2022 League of Canadian Poets awards
CBC Books | | Posted: May 6, 2022 5:30 PM | Last Updated: May 18, 2023
Prizes also went to Canadian poets Alisha Kaplan and Roxanna Bennett
Selina Boan is one of three writers who won the League of Canadian Poets' 2022 poetry awards.
The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Raymond Souster Award, each with a prize of $2,000, celebrate the best in Canadian poetry.
The prizes were created by the League of Canadian Poets, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting poets and poetry in Canada.
Boan's debut book, Undoing Hours, won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, which is awarded to a book of poetry written by a Canadian woman.
Undoing Hours explores the connection between language and power, as Boan reflects on her upbringing as a white settler and urban nehiyaw woman. It was also on the shortlist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
"These poems grasp both the jarring and gracious — bringing together awe-inspiring lapses of breath and rhythms in words between Cree and English that leave one panting," said the jury.
Vancouver-based Boan is a poetry editor for CV2 and Rahila's Ghost Press. She was a finalist for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize and her work has been included in Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2020.
Alisa Kaplan won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her debut poetry collection Qorbanot: Offerings. The award is given in the memory of arts administrator Gerald Lampert and recognizes a Canadian writer's first book of poetry.
Qorbanot: Offerings is a collaboration between Kaplan and artist Tobi Aaron Kahn. The collection explores the concept of sacrifice and ritual offerings, combining text and images. It reflects on how notions of sacrifice continue to resonate in the 21st century.
The jury said, "[Qorbanot: Offerings] approaches tradition and spirituality with reverence and humour, honouring those who have come before while challenging patriarchal limitations within Judaism."
Kaplan is a Toronto-based poet. She facilitates creative writing workshops with the Toronto Writers Collective, studies in Columbia University's Narrative Medicine Program and teaches healthcare workers how poetry can help to improve quality of care.
The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett was awarded the Raymond Souster Award, which honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The prize is presented to a book of poetry by a League member.
The Untranslatable I builds on Bennett's previous book, Unmeaningable, reflecting on invisible and visible disability identities. It was on the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
The jury said the book was "a triumph of art over duress," and that it "vibrates with struggles of illness and isolation while creating its own disability poetics."
Bennett is a poet from Whitby, Ont. Their other poetry collections include Unmeaningable and The Uncertainty Principle. Unmeaningable won the 2020 Raymond Souster Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the 2020 Trillium Book Award for poetry.
- This post was updated to reflect an author's change of name. May 18, 2023 4:21 PM