Filomena Acosta has made the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Little Ghosts.

The winner of the 2022 CBC Nonfiction 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 Sept. 15 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 22.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open for submissions until Oct. 31, 2022.

Filomena is a recent McMaster University graduate currently residing in Milton, Ont. A second generation daughter of Chilean — Andean and Mapuche descent — immigrants, she has made her home in all the books she has read. She writes short stories, with one being found under her real name, Emily Carrasco-Acosta, in a Canadian speculative fiction publication Augur Magazine. Little Ghosts is her first work of nonfiction.

"The baggage we all carry."

"I hit several low points in the past few years and felt like I needed to change. But after failed attempts at being a more functional person, I was at a loss as to why I struggled so much. I took time to evaluate my life and found just how much my past still affects me today. Trauma affects us all. However, I find that there was a dissonance between how I felt and what I've read about trauma.

"A lot of literature on trauma, especially for traumatic stress disorders like C-PTSD, sounds very clinical, but my everyday reality was more like: 'I feel possessed. I feel like I'm constantly under attack by something I can't see. I'm living with something insidious here.'

"So with this story, I've used influences in my life, being Latinx and Catholic, to really get down to the truth in how I made sense of the world and my experience living in it."

There are many qualities a human heart is made of: blood, muscle, ventricles, veins, vessels, connective tissue — but mine is haunted by all my little ghosts.

Perhaps there is a different word to describe them. Emotions might be accurate, memories could be precise and therapists tell me that "trauma can be a tricky thing to recognise." As a born and raised Catholic Latina, the most honest thing to say is that I have ghosts inside me.

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