Carol Thornton has made the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Sisters.

Carol Thornton has always imagined other lives. She grew up on the Eagle Valley, Alta. farm homesteaded by her great-grandfather and began to explore writing at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, Fort San. She studied Creative Writing at Oxford and received an MA from the University of East Anglia. Her poetry and short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, England, Ireland, the USA and Romania — in translation — and won several competitions and a radio play was broadcast on CBC Radio. She lives and works in Canmore, Alta.

Women surviving in brutal circumstances.

"I will never forget how brutalized I felt when I learned about some of the methods of enforcement of China's one-child policy. That policy couldn't have been enforced had not ordinary people carried out unjust orders. I listened for the voices of women living out their lives in impossible circumstances. When the policy was relaxed, I thought about the options opening up for women."

"To be born female . . ." Fu Xuan, 3rd century CE

The winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, will have their work published on CBC Books and will have the opportunity to attend a 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.