Carley Lizotte has made the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Pê-kîwêw (she returns, she comes home).

The winner of the 2019 CBC Poetry 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 Nov. 14, 2019. The winner will be announced on Nov. 21, 2019.

Carley Lizotte was born and raised in the northern community of Fort Vermilion, Alta., located along the Peace River on Treaty 8 Territory. Her poems are based on her experiences in the world as a Cree-Métis woman. She writes poetry and nonfiction and is passionate about the idea of how everything we do — and our existence itself — is poetry. Lizotte graduated from the University of Alberta with a B.Ed. degree in 2017. Since then she has been working as an educator, currently living in Edmonton.

A lament of my being.

"Pê-kîwêw (she returns, she comes home) is a collection of my lived experiences as a nehiyaw iskwew. The poems come from a place of longing — for justice and for home. However, these are concepts that I am not sure exist for me. In my poems, I speak of harmful stereotypes that have been perpetuated on Indigenous women since first contact. I am driven by a collective and ongoing feeling of unspeakable pain that often keeps me up at night. I try to imagine a world without this violence. I try to imagine a world in which we are free."