Meet the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize readers
CBC Books | Posted: November 7, 2023 3:37 PM | Last Updated: November 7, 2023
These 12 writers and editors determined the longlist for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize
Every year, CBC Books enlists the help of established writers and editors from across Canada to read the thousands of entries submitted to our prizes.
Our readers compile the longlist, which is given to the jury. You can meet the readers for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize below.
The jury for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize, comprised of Joseph A. Dandurand, Catherine Graham and Tolu Oloruntoba, then selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlisted selections.
The CBC Poetry Prize longlist will be unveiled on Thursday, Nov. 9. The shortlist will be announced on Thursday, Nov. 16 and then the winner will be revealed on Thursday, Nov. 23.
The CBC Poetry Prize winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a writing residency and have their work published on CBC Books.
Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and will have their work published on CBC Books.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January, the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April and the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September.
Below are the 12 writers who served as readers for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize.
Ayòmide Bayowa
Ayòmide Bayowa is a Nigerian Canadian poet, actor and filmmaker. He is the current poet laureate of Mississauga, Ont.
Bayowa's debut poetry collection, Gills, explores themes of race, identity and the Black diaspora.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier
Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois Acadian poet and translator. His first book, Correspondent, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. He lives in Vancouver, where he writes and teaches in both English and French. His latest book is the experimental work Entre Rive and Shore.
Bernier-Cormier uses a family myth in Entre Rive and Shore to discuss what it means to live between two languages. For him, that's English and French. For his family, the story goes that Bernier-Cormier's ancestor escaped a British prison the night before the Acadian Deportation by disguising his identity by wearing a dress. Bernier-Cormier explores the limitations and fluidity of translation.
Angela Bowden
Angela Bowden is an African Nova Scotian writer, poet, TEDx speaker and activist. Her first book of poetry, UnSpoken truth: unmuted and unfiltered is informed by her lived experiences as a Black woman and the unspoken stories of Black joy and struggle that she has heard around kitchen tables and her community, for decades. Black Girl, Black Girl is her debut book for children.
Black Girl, Black Girl is a spoken word poem with colourful and vivid illustrations that celebrates Black girl power. Featuring famous Black women such as Simone Biles, Carrie Best and Mayann Francis, and local heroes from Nova Scotia's historic Black communities, Black Girl, Black Girl inspires Black girls everywhere to support each other and claim their space in the world.
D.M. Bradford
D.M. Bradford is a poet, translator, editor and organizer based in Montreal. Bradford's debut collection, Dream of No One But Myself, won the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry; it also was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut book. In 2023, they published House Within a House, a French translation of Chilean-born Quebec queer poet Nicholas Dawson's Désormais, ma demeure. Bradford is a founding editor of House House Press. CBC Books named them a Black writer to watch in 2023.
Bradford's latest book, Bottom Rail on Top, is a collection of poems which embodies the Black histories of antebellum life and emancipation in America. Bottom Rail on Top meditates on lineage and legacy through poetic fragments.
Jake Byrne
Jake Byrne is a poet and writer who lives in Toronto. Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin is Byrne's debut poetry collection and their follow-up collection, Daddy, is forthcoming in 2024.
Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin chronicles modern queer life, including the writer's thoughts on the appropriation of queer culture in capitalism and war. Sharp imagery, incisive critiques and playful, sexual tones layer the poems.
Jen Currin
Jen Currin is a B.C. writer who teaches writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Currin's first collection of stories, Hider/Seeker, was awarded a Canadian Independent Book Award, was longlisted for a ReLit Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. Their previous collections of poetry include The Sleep of Four Cities, Hagiography, The Inquisition Yours and School. Currin was also a reader for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012.
Currin's latest collection of poetry, Trinity Street, explores the concept of a flawed utopia, imaginary gardens and the worlds of the living and the dead. Trinity Street is wide-ranging in its themes and topics, including a meditation on friendship amid climate crisis and the grief of late capitalism.
LISTEN | Jen Currin discusses their latest poetry collection on The Early Edition:
Hannah Green
Hannah Green is a Winnipeg-based writer and poetry editor. She was a poetry finalist for the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Green's poetry collection Xanax Cowboy is on the shortlist for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
Xanax Cowboy is a poetry collection that follows the adventures of the Xanax Cowboy, a pill-popping, whiskey drinking woman with a reputation like a rattlesnake.
t. liem
t. liem is a queer writer living in Montreal. Their debut collection Obits was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in as well as the A.M. Klein Prize in 2019. Their latest book is the collection Slows: Twice.
Slows: Twice is a book of repetition: each poem is paired with a mirror poem as a way of exploring identity, time and the hopeful potential of the future. The speaker of the poems searches for joy in the future while in the presence of their father's birthplace or a Motel 6 in Alberta or an aisle in the grocery store.
Sadie McCarney
Sadie McCarney is a P.E.I.-based author of the poetry collection Live Ones, which was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2020, and the poetry memoir Head War. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Literary Review of Canada and the Gay & Lesbian Review.
McCarney's second collection, Your Therapist Says Its Magical Thinking, pulls from a mix of her lived experience and historical fiction to explore neurodivergence, mental health and our current "self-care" culture in a whimsical, fragmented and honest way.
Emily Riddle
Emily Riddle is a nêhiyaw writer who is a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw) in Treaty Six Territory. Riddle won the first-ever Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Prize for her debut poetry collection The Big Melt published in 2022. One of the poems featured in the collection, Learning to Count, was on the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist. Riddle was named one of CBC Books's writers to watch in 2023.
The Big Melt is a debut poetry collection rooted in Nehiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. Part memoir, part research project, it draws on Riddle's experience working in Indigenous governance and her own family's experience — demonstrating that governance is as much about interpersonal relationships as it is about law and policy. The Big Melt won the 2023 High Plains Book Award for Poetry.
LISTEN | Makda Mulatu discusses Emily Riddle's new poetry collection The Big Melt:
Rebecca Salazar
Rebecca Salazar is a writer, editor and community organizer from New Brunswick. They edit the publications The Fiddlehead and Plenitude. Her poetry collection sulphurtongue was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards and the League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
sulphurtongue is Salazar's debut poetry collection. The wide array of poems explores how we create our identities and how they collide with and complicate each other. They take on the relationships to family, desire, religion, the land, politics, trauma and the natural world — and how these things shape who we are.
Nick Thran
Nick Thran is the author of three collections of poems. His second collection, Earworm, won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He works as an editor and bookseller in New Brunswick. Thran was a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary in 2015. His latest book is If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display.
If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display is a collection of poems and essays on the interior lives of booksellers, readers and writers. Thran, a bookseller himself, captures the passion and heart of reading communities.
LISTEN | Poet Nick Thran on The Calgary Eyeopener: