2024 Summer Lovin’ Contest winners
Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Summer Lovin' Contests!
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the winners of the 2024 Summer Lovin' Contests: Cheryl Chen's "God's Love Language is Physical Touch", winner of the Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest, and Pujita Verma's "WE BUY GOLD," winner of the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award.
"God's Love Language is Physical Touch" by Cheryl Chen
"WE BUY GOLD" by Pujita Verma
“I am beyond grateful to have won this prize. As a young writer, knowing that my words have the ability to, in some way, touch and resonate with others is a blessing. Thank you to those who read and believed in this poem.”
Of winning this award, Pujita writes: "It is a recognition of quiet resistance in writing—I’m honoured to be able to share this legacy of love that transcends language and geography.”
Cheryl Chen is a queer Chinese-Canadian writer in Toronto, Canada. Their work has been recognized by the League of Canadian Poets Jessamy Stursberg Prize, Foyle Young Poets Awards, Scholastic Writing Awards, Eden Mills Young Poets Prize, among others. Their work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Toronto Young Voices Magazine, ARTWIFE Magazine, The Next Generation Volume V, among others. They are the founder and co-editor-in-chief of Peiskos Literary Magazine.
Pujita Verma is an Indo-Canadian poet and illustrator. Her poem “Footnotes for the Toronto Sky” is featured across the Toronto Transit Commission Network, and she was Mississauga’s second Youth Poet Laureate (2018-20). Last year, she won the League of Canadian Poets Broadsheet Contest, a Mississauga Arts Council Award, the Eden Mills Writer's Festival Literary Contest, and was runner-up for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Pujita is the Youth Outreach Representative for Antler River Poetry and she works for War Child.
Read the winning poems
WE BUY GOLD
Due to its formatting, "WE BUY GOLD" is only available as an image. Click the image above to enlarge and read the poem, or read in a new window here.
God's Love Language is Physical Touch
He tells me this on our first date. The candlelight ripples across the skin on his face. He looks a bit like a sunfish, or like a children’s toy that outgrew itself. Sorry I’m late, he says. There was traffic and the roads were indecipherable. I say, No worries. The waiters come and go, each dressed like they are performing at their first violin concert. God pokes at his spaghetti. I nudge his calf with my foot. I say, Hey, I don’t usually date men. God laughs and bounces his knees. He takes back his teeth, blinks kinder eyes, grows gills on his forehead. Better? He asks me. I say, Good sport. We sip at our wine and dine in silence. I confess that my knees hurt. We check in at a hotel down the block and lie on the sofa. The children above our floor flee around their room. I can feel God staring at me. I know this feeling—I am expected to do something. I slow my breath. I ask him what he wants from me. He tells me what I’ve heard three handfuls of times: Hold me. I open myself into a crawlspace. In my arms, he is weeping.
Honorable mentions
About the jurors
Em Dial, juror for the Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest
Hollay Ghadery, juror for the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award
Em Dial is a queer, triracial, chronically ill creative born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. Em is a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. Their work has been described by José Olivarez as poetry “that sings and staccatos before bursting into rapture.”
Her captivating performances have brought her to venues across Turtle Island, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the final stages of the Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam and College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. They are a previous coach and team member of the Stanford slam team and an alumnus of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, where their infatuation with poetry was born and nourished.
Her work can be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Sonora Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the forthcoming Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere.
About the contests
The Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest and the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award are run annually, June 1 – August 10. Winners announced mid-September.
The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award is a $500 prize sponsored by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Foundation. This prize is awarded to the best single poem by a poet in the early stages of their career. The ALCTF aims to advance education by providing scholarships, bursaries and awards to Canadian residents for demonstrated excellence in the arts.
The Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest is an award that provides a prize for the single best poem submitted to our judges. This contest is open to all poets (professional, emerging, and first-time) in Canada, and is run each summer in memory of poet and friend Lesley Strutt.
The life of Lesley Enid Strutt (March 10, 1953 – February 3, 2021) revolved around her loved ones, her community and on poetry. One of her last wishes was to help establish an Award that would celebrate all three well into the future. Born in Quebec, she eventually called the town of Merrickville, Ontario, home.
Lesley’s own poetry was widely published in literary magazines and chapbooks, and Inanna Press, who published her Young Adult novel, On the Edge, in 2019, will publish her full collection, Window Ledge, in 2021, but one of her main interests was to wake up poetry in others, to stimulate new writing, and to share the joys of reading or listening to poetry. Her enthusiasm for new writers through the years she was Associate Representative on The League of Canadian Poets led to the creation of Fresh Voices, a space on the League’s website for poems only by associate members.
Her passion for trees gave her the idea of asking the League representatives of all regions of Canada if they would edit a section of an anthology on trees, which would be sold as a fundraiser for The League of Canadian Poets, and Heartwood: Poems for the Love of Trees was born.
In her last weeks she worked with a team of poetry-loving volunteers in Merrickville who have since raised, and continue to raise, thousands of dollars to support this Award. In this way, everything and everyone she loved comes together in gratitude for those who make poetry, or who simply love it.
What is a broadsheet? By definition, a broadsheet is a large piece of paper printed with information on one side only. In the world of poetry, a broadsheet is a great format in which to share or showcase one stand-out poem – winning the National Broadsheet Contest will surely do both!