2025 LCP Book Awards: Longlists
Celebrating the 2025 book award longlists
Congratulations to all the poets and publishers featured on the longlists of our Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Raymond Souster Award! We are thrilled to be highlighting twelve books on each longlist, selected with care by a panel of jurors. Each award carries a $2,000 prize for the winner.
The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, for a debut book of poetry, is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers.
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is awarded in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. As a women’s prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award is inclusive of cis women, trans women, and non-binary writers who feel comfortable being recognized by a women’s prize.
The Raymond Souster Award, which celebrates a new book of poetry by a League member, honors Raymond Souster, a founder of the League.
Award shortlists will be announced on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, and winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 14, 2025. An online reading will be held on Tuesday, May 13, 2025 at 8pm ET to celebrate the shortlisted poets.
Shortlists coming May 7, 2025
2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Longlist
For a debut book of poetry
2025 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Longlist
For a book of poetry by a woman
2024 Raymond Souster Award Longlist
For a new book of poetry by a League member
About the finalists
Faith Arkorful is a writer of Grenadian and Ghanaian descent. She is the author of The Seventh Town of Ghosts, published by McClelland and Stewart in 2024. Her work has appeared in GUTS Magazine, Peach Mag, PRISM International, Hobart Pulp, and Canthius Magazine, amongst other places. In 2021 she was a semi-finalist in the 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest and in 2019 she was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides.
When I published this book, my hope was that it would impact at least one person. It's an honour to be recognized by the League, which does important work to champion poets and our works. I hope with this recognition, the book can continue to reach more people.
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award. She was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
The League of Canadian Poets is an integral organization to my community and career as a poet. It's so meaningful to be recognized by their awards, as well as my peers on the juries who read over a hundred books and make difficult decisions to come up with the final lists. I know I'm among an incredible community of poets here.
Simina Banu's interests are at the intersection of capitalism, technology and mental health. In 2020, she published her debut full-length collection, Pop (Coach House Books), which won the 2021 ReLit Award for poetry. She has published several chapbooks: where art (words (on) pages), Tomorrow, adagio (above/ground), harmony in Beach Foam (Anstruther Press), and ERE—a collaboration with Amilcar John Nogueira (Collusion Books). In 2024, she released her second full-length poetry collection, I WILL GET UP OFF OF (Coach House Books).
Jes Battis teaches literature and creative writing in the prairies. Their work has been shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, in addition to being included in the Canada Reads competition.
It's an honor to be recognized within a group of so many talented poets. I'm so happy that my rambling little poems about being awkward and odd-brained and queer have found an audience.
Wakefield Brewster stepped onto his first stage as a Poet and Spoken Word Artist, January 1999. He is now known as one of Canada’s most powerful Professional Performance Poets, to date. In addition to filling the role as a Professional Performer, Wakefield is: a Professional Educating Artist; a Professional Poetic Interpreter™; a Professional Artistic Curator and Artistic Counsellor; Calgary’s First Poetry Slam Champion & 3-Time Champion; a Community Connector & Builder; and a Wellness and Recovery Advocate.
The City of Calgary has monikered him as a Social Poet, The Poet of The People. He became the sixth Poet Laureate of Calgary in 2022, first Black Poet Laureate of Calgary, ever. During National Poetry Month in April 2024, after a quarter-century of Professional Performance Poetry, Wakefield released his first written Poetry collection titled: WakeWord (Frontenac House). It is available in print, PDF, and audiobook. For more about Wakefield and his Lyrical Life, please visit wakefieldbrewster.com
At York University, my professor, she stated 3 adjectives and a prediction regarding my Poetry: my Poetry was nonsense, garbage, and gobbledegook - and that my words would never be read by anyone. Many lifetimes later, I have a book, a place as a finalist, and I have all the validation to continue on for the rest of my days. I am Elated, Flattered, Grateful, and Honoured for this nomination.
Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Ox Lost, Snow Deep, a feed dog book/Anvil Press, 2024; Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press; Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press; Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press; Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press; and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her most recent title, Ox Lost, Snow Deep, a book of long poems, has been shortlisted for the 2025 Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in such anthologies as GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2004), and others. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides, since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She is a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.
It is so lovely to be on the longlist for the Raymond Souster Award, for my sixth book of poetry, and for a book of long poems. And to share in the company of my peers and the community of Canadian poets, is something that feels very sweet indeed, especially in the context of an award named for a great and colloquial poet, a poet of the everyday fantastic.
Jody Chan is a poet, grief and death worker, and community organizer based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of three books of poetry, sick (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), impact statement (Brick Books, 2024), and madness belongs to the people (Brick Books, forthcoming 2026). Their first collection, sick, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. Jody is a member of the Daybreak Poets Collective, and co-host with Sanna Wani of the podcast Poet Talk.
In her recent poem "To a Young Poet," the Palestinian poet and organizer Zaina Alsous writes, "If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something." To me, the "something" that poetry can mean is relationship, comradeship, a material impact in the world. I'm endlessly grateful for every opportunity that my work (and the abolitionist, disability justice lineages it tries to honour) is given, to reach beyond itself and to draw those webs of interconnection ever wider.
Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet, multi-genre writer, judicial assistant, and editor of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent. The author of Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), and author/co-author of six poetry chapbooks, their writing has appeared in Augur, the Ex-Puritan, the Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head, and more. They are the co-founder of Riverbed—an experimental reading series based out of the National Capital Region, a member of Room magazine’s editorial collective, and a member of the poetry collective VII. A third culture kid at heart, Ellen’s writing is informed by their love of contemporary art, their concern with humanity’s impact on the Earth, and their experience moving through various societies as a femme-presenting genderqueer.
It is an honour to be a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. I often wonder if readers are looking for the experimental form and research-heavy concepts that my writing brings to the page. Being a finalist tells me that someone out there is hungry for this type of poetry.
Em Dial is a queer, Black, Taiwanese, Japanese, and White writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto. They are the author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024) and an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Guelph. Em's work can be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere.
In the Key of Decay receiving this recognition is a great honor. It was written from a place resisting the need to prove myself, so an acknowledgment like this feels all the more sweet. Thank you to the League for this opportunity!
Clare Goulet is a British/Québécoise hybrid from a mixed-race, mixed-language family, raised in Nova Scotia and Staffordshire, England with a childhood stint in the village of Fleurines, France. That hybridity informs all her work. Essays, fiction, reviews, mixed-media forms, research, and poems have been published in journals and books in Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK, including The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Canada, Collateral, the anthology Listening for the Heartbeat of Being (MQUP), and the enclopaedic Lichens of Ireland & Great Britain. She has presented creative work across Canada and overseas. With Mark Dickinson, she co-edited the anthology Lyric Ecology (Cormorant) on the work of Canadian poet-philosopher Jan Zwicky. Her first poetry book, Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau), is shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award and has been reviewed in both arts and science publications, in Canada and the UK. She recently created and built the outdoor installation poem trail "Symbiotic" at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts on North Mountain, Nova Scotia. Current project “Closer”, on looking and intimacy, will be released 2026. Clare Goulet teaches at MSVU in Halifax, where she runs its Writing Centre.
As a teen I walked every day after school down a crumbling road thumbing through one of those M & S secondhand paperbacks—mine was Eli Mandel's Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-70. I loved it. So this nomination, shocking to me, brought me right back to that girl and that road. That it's named for Raymond Souster means a lot to a shy but passionate teacher of emerging writers—because Souster was that —possibly even more shy and more passionate!
Nathanael Jones is an Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer and artist. Born in Montreal, he holds degrees from NSCAD University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited and performed across North America and the United Kingdom, and has been published in DREGINALD, Ghost Proposal, Aurochs, Heavy Feather Review, TIMBER, and is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine. Jones' poetry collections include Aqueous, out now with The Porcupine's Quill, and the chapbooks ATG (HAIR CLUB 2016) and La Poésie Caraïbe (Damask Press, 2018).
I am very humbled to know that my work could move my peers to nominate this collection for a national award. It has always been a dream of mine to not only put my work out into the world but also have it connect with people: this nomination speaks to the capacity for that dream to come true.
Tonya Lailey (she/her) lives in Calgary, firsr known as Mok-kin-tsis, the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy. She spent her childhood on a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake., first named Onguiaahra, an Iroquoian name meaning “the strait” or “thundering water”. After completing a master’s degree in political theory at Queen’s University in Kingston, she returned to the farm to start a winery with her family and winemaker Derek Barnett. Certified as a sommelier, she worked in the wine trade for twenty years, first as a partner and employee of the winery operation (Lailey Vineyard), then running her own wine agency in Calgary, Alberta. Her two daughters were born in Calgary where she has since raised them in partnership with her former husband. In 2022, Lailey received an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.
Tonya writes mostly poetry along with essays, reviews and children’s fiction. Her poems have appeared in Grain, Rattle, The Fiddlehead, Room, FreeFall, Arc Poetry and Mslexia Magazine among others. She has twice won ‘best poem’ in FreeFall’s Annual Prose and Poetry Competition (2022, 2024). Her poem, "The Bottle Depot" was shortlisted for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year in 2024. Her poem, "Also", was a finalist in Mslexia Magazine’s Poetry Contest in 2024, judged by Jane Hirshfield. Farm : Lot 23, published by Gaspereau Press (2024), is her first full-length poetry collection.
I'm thrilled to learn my book made the longlist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. What an honour. A poetry book is a very quiet thing, a few leaves rustling in the woods. Having some light shine through the big cultural canopy onto my poetry book cover for a few moments feels warm and very good. It feels especially great to be a finalist among other women writers for an award in memory of poet Pat Lowther. Thank you to the staff and volunteers at the League of Canadian Poets for organizing these annual book awards and for the readers and jurors who spent time with all the books!
Anna Lee-Popham is a writer, editor, and instructor. Her poetry collection, Empires of the Everyday, was published by McClelland & Stewart. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and is a graduate of Simon Fraser University's Writer’s Studio and University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Education Creative Writing Certificate, where she received the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Her writing was first runner-up in PRISM international’s Pacific Poetry Prize, shortlisted for The Fiddlehead Creative Nonfiction Contest and Room's Poetry Contest, longlisted for CBC's nonfiction prize, and published in Arc, Brick, Canthius, Riddle Fence, Autostraddle, and others. Anna teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph and the University of Toronto.
In Empires of the Everyday, I sought to bring language to the workings of the world, the constraints and attempts at resistance. Pat Lowther and I were writing at times that, though different, are analogous in their continuous ruptures and people's attempts at subversion. Having this collection recognized by the Pat Lowther Memorial Award is a thrill, an honour, and a reminder of the critical role of poetry in working within and through, in Pat Lowther's words, "the opacities of our own understanding."
Callista Markotich has enjoyed a life-long career as a teacher, principal and Superintendent of Education in Eastern Ontario. Retired, she has turned her esteem for the written word to her enduring love, poetry. Her poems appear in numerous Canadian reviews and quarterlies from The Antigonish Review through Vallum, and from Vancouver B.C. to Saint John’s N.L and also in several American and British magazines and journals. Her poetry has received first and second place awards and a placement in the League of Canadian Poets Poem in Your Pocket campaign. It has been short-listed and Honourably Mentioned in Canadian contests and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the National Magazine Awards. Her suite, Edward, was a finalist in the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award and also in the 2024 Toad Hall Chapbook Contest with The Poets Corner. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry. Her first collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel (2024) was published by Frontenac House. Callista lives gratefully on the banks of Lake Ontario, traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nation, in Kingston Ontario, with her husband Don of fifty-nine years.
How pleased and excited I am to learn that my first collection is a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Because I developed my serious writing practice late in life, I am in a different stage than most poets publishing first collections, and this honour so beautifully lifts me from that realm of invisibility which many people past youth fear to inhabit, and validates my advocacy of life-long learning and faith in the concepts of growth and enrichment from infancy to old age. The jurists' validation of my poetry is like an elixir, a serum, a pop of champagne celebrating – and inspiring more reading, more writing of the exquisite form. I am tickled pink, and I imagine how this longlisting, which I prize, may draw positive attention to my forthcoming manuscript, and how my parents and my sister, gone now from this earth, are happier than ever with their loving cameos in Wrap in a Big White Towel.
Domenica Martinello is the author of All Day I Dream about Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019) and Good Want (Coach House Books, 2024) and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The title poem of her most recent collection, “Good Want,” won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize in 2023. For her prose writing, Domenica won the carte blanche 3Macs Prize (2017) for a genre-bending work of literary criticism on Elena Ferrante, and has published reviews and criticism in The Globe & Mail, The Montreal Review of Books, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. Domenica has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and 2025 (Biblioasis), and her work has been supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She lives in Montreal.
It’s an honour to be recognized as a finalist and I'm so grateful. Poetry is often a solitary and slow practice, unfolding over time, moving towards a point of resonance. Recognition like this reminds me to keep working towards that connection.
E. McGregor is a Settler/Metis writer currently based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in various literary magazines in Canada, the United States, and Scotland. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in 2022. What Fills Your House Like Smoke is her first book-length collection of poetry.
Being longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is a true honour. I feel very blessed to have the support of many amazing writers and readers in the Canadian poetry community whose receptiveness to this book has been an inspiration. I am continually delighted by those who have read the book and found something of their own mind and heart reflected inside it.
Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and has lived in Canada for more than forty years. Her poetry books include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or. She is the author of several novels, including Polar Vortex, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, and Cereus Blooms at Night which is now a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Classics book. Her work has been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Giller Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, among others. She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary's James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award, and The National Library’s Library and Archives Scholar Award. She lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.
It is a real honour to be in the company of all the fine poets, past and present, who have been Pat Lowther Memorial Award nominees. I am deeply grateful!
Zehra Naqvi is the author of The Knot of My Tongue (McClelland & Stewart) and a recipient of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry awarded by the Writers' Trust of Canada. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The New Quarterly, The Capilano Review, Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM international and elsewhere. Her work has been commissioned by Amnesty International and UNHCR, and has been featured on CBC Radio and in the Toronto Star. Zehra received a residency from Queen’s University and has guest lectured at the University of Victoria and Stanford University. She holds Master’s degrees in Migration Studies and Social Anthropology from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She has a Bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from UBC. Zehra was born in Karachi, Pakistan and grew up on Coast Salish territories (outside Vancouver).
It is a deep honour to have my collection read with such care and attention by fellow poets. The writing career of a poet can be challenging, unpredictable, and precarious. The recognition and support provided by the League goes a long way in making an author feel part of a broader community of poets, and gives reassurance that this challenging path is worthwhile. I am immensely grateful.
Jennifer May Newhook’s first word was “book.” She published her first poem at seventeen and in the years since has received recognition for her work in this genre by the Atlantic Writing Competition, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards, the Gregory J. Power Poetry Award, and the Riddle Fence Poetry Prize. Her poetry and short stories have been anthologized and published nationally and internationally in literary journals and magazines including Riddle Fence, The Newfoundland Quarterly, Paragon, and The Pottersfield Portfolio. Jennifer’s first published short story was longlisted for the Writer’s Trust Journey Prize, and most recently, her first novel, The Gulch, was longlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Best Unpublished First Manuscript. She took an extended hiatus from writing to raise small children and has now risen blinking from the rubble, eager to embrace her status as a debut author. Jennifer’s first full-length poetry collection, Last Hours, was published by Riddle Fence in Spring 2024. Jennifer works as a writer and editor in downtown St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), where she lives with her partner, three teens, one tween, and two cats.
I am deeply honored for my first collection, Last Hours, to be recognized by the League of Canadian Poets. Nomination for the prestigious Gerald Lampert Memorial Award has been incredibly encouraging as I continue work on my second collection (with all the doubts and difficulties that seem to inevitably come with such efforts) and for that, I am so thankful! As a later-in-life debut author myself, I eagerly embrace any opportunity to raise visibility for women writers—particularly those at mid-life and beyond—who are working towards the goal of publication. Last Hours would not exist in published form without the support and relentless encouragement of a generous community of writers, publishers, organizations, and awards such as this one!
Marc Perez is the author of Dayo (Brick Books, 2024) and the chapbook, Domus (Anstruther Press, 2025). His work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, EVENT, CV2, PRISM International, and Vallum, among others. Originally from Manila, he currently lives with his family in Vancouver.
It's humbling to know that fellow poets read Dayo with such intent and depth.
Jane Shi is a poet, writer, and organizer living on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022) and the winner of The Capilano Review’s 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest. Her debut poetry collection is echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.
I’ve been writing poetry since I was eight years old. What was once childhood play soon morphed into a necessary form of survival—the lonely kind where language served as rebellion, buoy, and, at times, protection and distance. Since publishing echolalia echolalia with Brick Books I’ve been grateful to build friendships and community with other poets, and being a finalist for this award reminds me that we write to connect. I’m humbled that the growth and attempts at vulnerability I express in my work can reach others and, in turn, also change me.
Bren Simmers is the winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Her latest poetry collection, The Work (Gaspereau Press), was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. She lives on Epekwitk/PEI.
Being a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award is a great honour both for me and for those I lost. I hope this recognition allows the book to reach readers who are going through their own grief journey.
Cristalle Smith is published in ARC, CV2, Room and elsewhere. She is the winner of subTerrain's Lush Triumphant Literary Award in creative non-fiction. Cristalle's debut poetry collection, Invisible Lives, is a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Book of Poetry and is out with University of Calgary Press in the Brave & Brilliant Series. She lives in Red Deer, Alberta with her son.
As a survivor of domestic violence writing in the aftermath of trauma through my poetic work, I feel deeply honored to be considered for this award. I am so grateful I had the opportunity to tell my story.
Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News, which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Being named a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award is a delight! First, because it means three thoughtful readers connected with my book. Second, because it might bring a bit more attention to contemporary haiku being written in Canada. Third, because Raymond Souster once said, of Queen Anne’s Lace and poems, that “You'll never tire / of bending over to examine, / of marvelling at this / shyest filigree of wonder / born among grasses.”
Barbara Tran revels in blurring the lines between genres. She authored the titular character’s narration of "Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend," a short VR film nominated for Best VR Story at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Her short fiction has garnered two National Magazine Award nominations. A lyric essay was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Precedented Parroting, a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award, is her debut book. She lives in Tkaronto and is a member of the international collectives AfroMundo and She Who Has No Master(s).
Joy. Pure joy. Being able to celebrate poetry is a huge win, especially in these times. Thank you, LCP and jury. Congratulations, poets!
Chimwemwe Undi is a poet, editor and lawyer living and writing on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her debut collection, Scientific Marvel, won the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award. She is Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate for 2025 and 2026.
I am so grateful. Past lists of LCP Book Award finalists and winners have heavily influenced my reading lists and me, and I am moved to know that Scientific Marvel will be counted among them.
shō yamagushiku's work is grounded in a diasporic okinawan consciousness. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). His first poetry collection, entitled shima, reflects ancestors, violence, and tradition.
Being a finalist means inertia, clarity, fire moving forward and the chance to fortify the community roots and networks that continue to bring shima (to) life