Shandra Spears Bombay has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for The Voice Of The River.

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

Shandra Spears Bombay has shared her writing in anthologies including Strong Women Stories, Indigenous Women: The State of Our Nations and the Four Winds Literary Magazine. She was also part of a special adoptee anthology called Outsiders Within. Shandra has been working for an extremely long time on a one-woman show about the Sixties Scoop, and has exhausted the patience of herself and everyone around her (but it's going to be great). Shandra is Anishinaabe and a member of Rainy River First Nations/Manitou Rapids, doing her best to move from Toronto to the rez with a pandemic in the way.

"Jagged tumbling over the rocks."

"This is a very important moment for me culturally and as a Sixties Scoop survivor, second- and third-generation Indian Residential School survivor, as I return to the community and work through all the things I don't know or understand about rez life. As the poem tumbles around and back, it expresses the tumbling of my life in my new context and the one constant which is the voice of the river."

boozhoo ndinawe maaganok
says the voice of the river
that flashes over the rocks
the rapids that flash with sturgeon jumping

one lone goose family
sheltering in the maple trees
the water too high for us to reach
to tap this year
and pelicans perching on the rocks
looking for fishes to eat and feed to their babies
migizi sits nearby waiting for lunch

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.