Pamela Porter has made the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Portrait of the Artist with Claribel Alegria 1924-2018.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 17 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 24.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January and the CBC Poetry Prize opens in April.

Pamela Porter is the author of Cathedral, No Ordinary Place and Likely Stories (Poems). Her work has appeared in Vallum, Arc, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Freefall, The Malahat Review and other publications. Pamela lives with gratitude on a small horse farm on the northern peninsula of the W̱SÁNEĆ peoples on Vancouver Island.

Porter previously made the CBC Poetry Prize longlist in 2020 for She sits down to write the history of rain and suddenly the wild fall into order and 2019 for Families don't exist here.

"Imaginary conversation with the poet."

"When I was still living in the U.S., my husband and I travelled to Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras with a group called Witness for Peace, during the time that the U.S. government was making war on those countries. There were about 20 of us who would go into the small, rural villages and stay with the people there, and sleep in their houses in order to keep the families safe. I remember how one family we stayed with had one double bed in their small home and the two children slept in the middle of the bed and the mother and father on either edge. We slept on the dirt floor. In the morning, the mother rose early, pulled a pipe and faucet from under the bed, went into the yard and began to fill a bucket with water for cooking and drinking. The family was safe, at least for that night.

"When Claribel Alegria's poems began to be translated by Carolyn Forche, I read and collected much of Alegria's poetry in in translation. Alegria was born in El Salvador, educated in the U.S. and later returned to Nicaragua to live and write. Her poems spoke to me of the horror of war and the necessity of working for peace and justice in conflicted countries. I still have clear memories of our time spent in that area and the uncertainty of being in a war zone at that time. My inspiration for writing my poem about Alegria came from her own courage to speak out for peace and how, with only our presence, we made ourselves an obvious buffer between the marginalized and the powerful."

I'm standing on the bridge
beside her — the Señora, the poet,
as water below us sweeps
everything away — leaves,
branches, the broken, the fallen
trees. My dead wait on every corner,
she begins, and I want her
to know we have some things
in common: I tell her, death
comes to life every night for me, too.

The winner of the 2022 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 the 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 Nonfiction Prize will open in January. The 2023 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.