7 writers make the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story omitted two entries that had been selected by the jury. The original list has been revised to include the additional pieces.

The finalists for the 2019 CBC Poery Prize are:

• Family Affair by Faith Arkorful(Toronto)
• Shelter Object by Stephanie Bolster(Pointe-Claire, Que.)
• The Grolar Bear's Ballad by Catherine Greenwood(Victoria)
• Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih by Alycia Pirmohamed(Calgary)
• You Left Somethingby Erin Soros(Toronto)
• 12 by Sarah Tsiang(Kingston, Ont.)
• Caribou in the Anthropoceneby Cara Waterfall(Costa Rica)

Each of thefinalists will receive$1,000 and have their work published byCBCBooks. You can read their poems by clicking the links above.

The winner will be announced on Nov. 21, 2019.

They will receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, attend a two-week writing residency at theBanff Centre for Arts and Creativityand havetheir work published byCBC Books.

The 2019 CBC Poetry Prize jury wascomprised of Lynn Crosbie, Olive Senior and Billy-Ray Belcourt.

The longlist was compiled by ateam of readers made up of writers and editors from across Canada. There were more than 2,500 English-language submissions.

Get to know the finalists and read their work below.

Family Affairby Faith Arkorful

About Faith:Faith Arkorful has had her work published in Guts, Peach Mag, Prism International, Hobart, Without/pretend, The Puritanand Canthius, amongothers. She was a semi-finalist in the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides.

Why she wrote Family Affair:"My beautiful friend SannaWani asked me to write a response poem to her poemThe Earth is Soft. I was struck by the image of someone digging their own grave and from that idea emerged my own, the image of ghosts leaving their graves to attend a party."

• Read Family Affair

Shelter Objectby Stephanie Bolster

About Stephanie:Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry.The most recent one,A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, was a finalist for the Pat LowtherMemorial Award. Work from her current manuscript,Long Exposure, was a finalist for the 2012CBC Poetry Prizeand made the2017 CBC Poetry Prizelonglist. Her first book,White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and theGerald Lampert Memorial Award in 1998and was translated into French byPierre Blanche. In 2008, she served as the editor ofThe Best Canadian Poetry in English.She was born in Vancouver and teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal.

Why she wrote Shelter Object:"The impact of Chernobyl has reverberated in me since it was first a news item onThe Nationalwhen I was in high school.But my true inspiration came through artistic sources: Robert Polidori's photographs (Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl), Svetlana Alexievich's nonfiction bookVoices from Chernobyland Andrei Tarkovsky's filmStalker, which, though released seven years before the accident in 1986, may have shaped the mood of this poem more than any documentary source. (To date, I've resisted seeing the HBO series.)"

• Read Shelter Object

The Grolar Bear's Balladby Catherine Greenwood

About Catherine:Catherine Greenwood has lived in British Columbia, New Brunswick, China and southeast England. Sherecently moved to South Yorkshirewhere, as a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, she is pursuing an interest in Scottish Gothic poetry. Past jobsinclude publications analyst, foreign expert, financial aid adjudicator and pet sitter. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies and has been recognized with several prizes, including a gold National Magazine Awardand the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award. Along with Gothic poetry, she has been working on a neo-Gothic novel.

Why she wrote The Grolar Bear's Ballad:"Back in 2006, I read a newspaper account of a bear shot in the Arctic identified as a hybrid of polar and grizzly. There was speculation that cross-species breeding had occurred as a result of global warming which caused the polar bears to range further south, andin the case of the grizzly, north,of their usual territories. I kept the clippingwith a photo of the slain bearand only years later found an approach to writing about it."

• Read The Grolar Bear's Ballad

Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie StormandTasbihby Alycia Pirmohamed

About Alycia:Alycia Pirmohamed is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying figurative homelands in poetry written by second-generation immigrant writers. She is the author ofFaces that Fled the Windand a recent recipient of the Calgary Arts Development's project grant program. Alycia received her MFAfrom the University of Oregon.

Why she wrotePrairie Storm, one of the poems in the collection:"The poemis a landscape that weaves together multiple aspects of my upbringing: culture, location, language, (un)belonging. After recently visiting the country where my parents were born for the first time, I found myself reflecting on the different rural towns/cities where I spent some of my childhood in Alberta. I was interested in building a scene that held together the prairies with aspects of my ancestral heritage but also wanted to illustrate the complexity of belonging through the image of a storm."

• ReadLove Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih

You Left Somethingby Erin Soros

About Erin:A settler from Vancouver, Erin Soros has published fiction, nonfiction and poetry in international journals and anthologies. She is a pastCBC Short Story PrizeandCommonwealth Short Story Prize winner.In 2019, her essay in The Fiddlehead was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and her poemWeightreceived the Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize. Soros has been a visiting writer at four universities, most recently the University of Cambridge.She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

• Read You Left Something

12by Sarah Tsiang

About Sarah:Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang is the author of 10 booksincluding poetry, picture books and fiction. Her 2013 bookStatus Updatewas nominated for the Pat LowtherMemorial Award and her 2011 bookSweet Devilrywon the Gerald LampertMemorial Award. She has been anthologized in collections such asBest of the Best Canadian Poetry,Poet-to-Poetand theNewborn Anthology. Her poemMy Boymade the longlistfor the2018 CBC Poetry Prize. She currently teaches poetry through UBC's optional residency MFA program.

Why she wrote 12:"This long poem in 12 sections is about my daughter when she was 12. It's a complicated time and I wanted to capture the beauty and danger of that age."

• Read 12

Caribou in the Anthropoceneby Cara Waterfall

About Cara:Cara Waterfall was born Ottawa and lives in Costa Rica. Cara's work has been featured or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry, CV2, The Maynard, The Fiddlehead, SWWIM, Rust + Moth and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She won Room's 2018 Short Forms contest and second place in Frontier Poetry's 2018 award for new poets. She has a postgraduate diploma in poetry & lyric discourse from the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser Universityand a postgraduate diploma from the London School of Journalism.

Why she wrote Caribou in the Anthropocene:"I read a phenomenal poem calledThe Antler Treeby Paul Zarzyski and was struck by the beauty of the shed antlers being assembled into a monument of 'grace / a sculpted substance / textured, with heft.' It made me think about the ways in which the caribou embody grace in nature and how we affect that grace in the way we live and consume."

• ReadCaribou in the Anthropocene

To see the finalists for the French competition,go toPrix de posieRadio-Canada.

The 2018CBC PoetryPrizewinnerwasNatalie LimforArrhythmia.

• How Natalie Lim wrote the poem that won the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize

TheCBC Literary Prizes have been recognizing Canadian writers since 1979. Past winners include Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Michael Winter and Frances Itani.

If you're a writer,you can join ourCanada Writes Facebook group, a place where Canadian writers can connect and support each other.

Interested in enteringthe CBC Literary Prizes? The2020CBC Nonfiction Prizewill open in January, the 2020CBC Poetry Prizewill open in April and the 2021Short Story Prizewill open in September.

For writers in Grades 7 to 12,The First Page student writing challenge is now open for submissions until Nov. 25, 2019.