Toronto poet Kate Cayley wins $20K Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry

Kate Cayley has won the 2021 Ross and Davis Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry for her poem Lent.

The $20,000 prizeis awarded every other year and recognizes poetry that explores religious faith.

Cayley is a fiction writer, playwright and poet based in Toronto. She is also the author of the YA novelThe Hangman in the Mirror, the poetry collectionsWhen This World Comes to an EndandOther Housesand the short story collectionsHow You Were Born andHouseholders.

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Lent will be published in Image magazine and in the digital 2021 prize anthology.

"Though it isn't what I would call a 'happy' poem, Lent defeats me into joy," the prize's head juror, Shane McCrae, said in a statement.McCrae is an American poet and thepoetry editor of Image.

"I love this poem because it itself seems to speak from the position of fallenness not personal guilt, and not necessarily fallenness in the Christian sense, but from the fallenness that is one's awareness that one has not always lived in a way one would recommend to others."

The 2021 shortlist was also announced in conjunction with announcing Cayley as the winner.

The shortlist was comprised of:

• basketball prayer, for Issachar, by Benjamin Hertwig
• Quinn Abbey, Ireland by Kate Marshall Flaherty
• Folded and faulted, I swear I'll keep it, a sundog translucence inside my fear of death by Melanie Siebert
• Kin Prayer by Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Prize judges read almost 300 submissions before selecting the finalists and winner.

A celebration of the winner and finalists will be held at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto on Oct. 14.

Past winners include Susan Alexander, Brandon Trotter and Rowda Mohamud.