Nancy Kang has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Home Someplace Elsewhere.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 16 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 23.

Nancy Kang teaches in the women's and gender studies program at the University of Manitoba where she is Canada Research Chair in transnational feminisms and gender-based violence. Her co-authored book, The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat, explores the life and work of a key Dominican-born American poet. Kang was the inaugural winner of the U.S.'s Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award for Poetry and has published in various literary and scholarly venues.

"Three vignettes of precarious life."

"The words in the overarching title correspond to each poem in the submission. 'Home' (for Devotion) meditates on the nature of diaspora as well as our spiritual and literal journeys back to places or people we long for but cannot quite reach; 'Someplace' (for Last Resort) refers to an unspecified tourist destination and the ironies of power at play when we seek to escape our mundane lives for some great newness; 'Elsewhere' (for Refuge, Refugee) centres the urgencies of migration when compelled by extreme circumstances.

"The first and second poems come from shared and lived experiences. The third emerged after working with some Norwegian graduate students on global refugee literature. I also subconsciously channeled my parents' experience with war and colonial occupation."

My friend's grandmother,
cobalt blue sari, warm arms downed
with cinnamon shadows, a mist of heat
and cool camphor for sore joints,

The winner of the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize 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 have their work published on CBC Books.

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