2025 Summer Lovin’ Contest winners
Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Summer Lovin' Contests!
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the winners of the 2025 Summer Lovin' Contests: Maria Giesbrecht's "A poem about death and tomatoes," winner of the Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest, Cassandra Myers's "KLEPTOTHERMY AND OTHER THEFTS OF FLESH," winner of the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award, and Shafraz Ladak's "14x0," winner of the Summer Lovin' LCP Spoken Word Award.
"A poem about death and tomatoes" by Maria Giesbrecht
"KLEPTOTHERMY AND OTHER THEFTS OF FLESH" by Cassandra Myers
"14x0" by Shafraz Ladak
LCP Spoken Word Award
Shafraz Ladak, "14x0"
I am truly grateful and humbled for this opportunity to share my words with the world. I wrote my poem about the children of Gaza, who have shown otherworldly strength and courage in a world that had no right to demand it from them. As I type these words, and as you read them, their inhumane suffering continues. A genocide plays out in front of our eyes ands it feels as though the world should stand still, but it continues to move forward. We as people, fellow members of the human race, cannot allow this kind of suffering to become the norm. Martin Luther King Jr. said "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," and our greatest weapon against injustice is our voice. I hope my poem shows that every one of you has a voice with power, and if we use our voices together, there is nothing in this world we cannot change.
Juror Faith Paré writes: In his performance “14x0”, Ladak confronts the cynical calculations of colonization, racism, and modern warfare, which undergird the ongoing occupation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Ladak calls into question our cultural grammar which determines which human lives ‘count’: whose lives are protected from, and by, violence, and whose are condemned to subjugation. The title refers to, at the time of Ladak’s composition, 14 pages’ worth of Palestinian children reported by the Gaza Health Ministry who have been killed before their first birthday. As of July 15, 2025, the total number of infants who have died before age 1 is 953. As of September 4, 2025, the recorded death toll in Gaza has reached 64,000.
The poet is attuned to this mathematics of cruelty, “how zero… can be multiplied into complete insignificance.” I am struck by how Ladak shatters the normalization of suffering in the news cycle’s repetition with anaphora itself, reminiscent of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station series. Ladak uses the breath masterfully as a tool for sonic texture and punctuation, that allows his words to unfurl with a force and grace similar to Saul William’s jeremiad style. Ladak exhumes the haunting resonances in language and in history.
Among an impressive pool of
finalists, “14x0” stands apart in its
demonstration of how we still might
turn to spoken word, born into its
modern iteration from a hunger for
the poetical and the political, to
make sense from the senseless.
Ladak endeavours the unbearable
task of measuring the loss of so
many futures from the “decades of
selfish / sinful / sickening hatred” — a
loss we will be called to account for
when “one day,” in the words of
Omar El-Akkad, “everyone will have
been against this.”— Faith Paré, juror
Shaf is a writer, poet, spoken word artist, activist and organizer. The 4x Calgary Poetry Slam champion, Shaf's writing blends politics, social justice and literary narrative into a poetic experience that tugs at the heart and inspires our inner humanity. He has represented Calgary at literary festivals across Canada and placed 3rd at the 2025 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championships. A board member of the Single Onion reading series and the Director of Communications for the Calgary Poetry Slam, Shaf has dedicated his life to advocating for the arts.
Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award
Cassandra Myers, "KLEPTOTHERMY AND OTHER THEFTS OF FLESH"
"Kleptothermy and other thefts of flesh" is a poem that is both thermometer and thermostat, reading the temperature of a
relationship and changing the climate accordingly.—Ambrose Albert, juror
For years, I had given up on being seen. I am only now just regaining the courage to be noticed. Being a poet can be lonely work, but to be in the lineage of winners for this prize, is to be amongst people I love. Who made my sharp work possible by their green opaled gentleness. I owe it to them, a thousand lifetimes over. Thank you for choosing me.
when the blue lipped sea krait - venom ten-fold
a diamondback - slinks into the seabird nest -
it is born to loot
animals must take more energy than exerted -
an economy of actions - through feeding - or sunning
or for this snake - hugging - a bendy thermometer rising
so much has been said of hunger - but what of heat?
°C
i am no beginner at theft - magpie disorder -
brittle chokers - dead monarchs - velvet gowns -
fish gills I’ll never wear
my economy of want - I take what I am owed -
nothing lost or gained when ants make condos of bone
°C
my wife - a hearth with freckles - asks for a bigger bed
i am the cayman to her termite nest - her ice tray ankles
for my cold pack chest - every degrees she gives me
she doesn’t get back - offering - the overcoat of sacrifice
she feels under appreciated - tucks warmth behind her ear
in the morning I make her tea - she faces the wall to sleep
°C
studies show the less social contact you have -
the lower the heat gun beeps - when she leaves me
i ask concrete - who will put their arm
in the door between me and winter?
i bed my metabolic rate - mercury sick
crepuscular grief - beg the January lake
for a numb so final it will snowglobe me
at the center of empty’s jawbreaker
we know about freeze response -
but what about melt?
°C
melt is me tearing loss from its plastic bag
rushing it’s boil - an economy of actions -
leather cool boys - take my pulse
i’m blistering for loud breath
freezer burn - to be be both ice and melt and ice once more
to loose all that plumps you with movement - an icicle’s husk
maybe the C in C-PTSD is for celsius
i’m a walking silver tube
only red or blue
hyper or hypo aroused
°C
thaw is melt when a child of sun comes home
an entire whole year without touch - i didn’t shrivel
went to coffee shops alone - took only candles
into my bed - lantern rite - incense river - warm
was my own eye being fulled with morning
it’s yellow demand
°C
maybe that bird needed a squeeze
as much as the snake needed the lite
less theft, more barter - touch symbiotic -
when they take my temperature
at the grocery store - I pass the test
I pay for everything in my cart
°C
my divorce gift to her - a bespoke kitchen knife
when she takes it by the spine - she still takes me
by the hand - on one end tenderness and the other -
slaughter. when she cooks with her new wife
i am still feeding her which is to say,
by a blade’s blue steel - i can still
keep her warm
Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest
Maria Giesbrecht, "A poem about death and tomatoes"
The plants in my garden reach
for the torso of the deck—a skeleton
of cedar. Something dead holds
something alive. The saddest story
we can tell. And Father’s eyes
were first romas, then oozing beefsteaks—
in ten years:
heirlooms. Two wild,
red things we’ll never forget.
I'm reminded now, more than ever, of both tomato season, its fleeting nature, and the way language, like harvest, depends on many hands. Receiving this prize feels like a shared abundance.
This poem breathes a wealth of lived experience, laying grief plain and vulnerable into the hands of the reader. I admire the honesty, as I do in any poem, especially as it gently offers a way to move forward, just as nature does. The tomatoes are as sweet as the future.
—Terese Mason Pierre, juror
Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose writings explore her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Literary Review of Canada, Queen's Quarterly, CV2, Grain, and Canadian Literature. She won the 2025 Jack McCarthy award and was a finalist in the 2025 Narrative Poetry contest. Her debut collection, A LITTLE FERAL, is forthcoming in 2026 with Write Bloody Publishing. mariagiesbrecht.com
Honorable mentions
Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest
Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award
LCP Spoken Word Award
About the jurors
Terese Mason Pierre, Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest
Ambrose Albert, Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award
Faith Paré, LCP Spoken Word Award
Terese Mason Pierre (she/her) is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Fantasy Magazine, among others. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize, and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Myth is her debut poetry collection, from House of Anansi Press, and she is the editor of As The Earth Dreams, a collection of Black Canadian speculative short fiction. Terese lives and works in Toronto, Canada, and has an MFA from University of Guelph.
Ambrose Albert (he/him | il) is a transmasc poet living on the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. His debut collection of poetry Bec & Call (Nightwood Editions 2018) won the New Brunswick Book Awards’ Fiddlehead Poetry Prize and he was Fredericton’s Poet Laureate from 2019-2021. Ambrose’s chapbook mal à l’aise came out with Anstruther Press in January 2024. He is currently working on a new collection of poetry and a novel about a transman experiencing an immaculate pregnancy.
A storyteller of Afro-Guyanese ancestry, Faith Paré writes poetry, performance, and criticism. Faith is the winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry for “Selections from a fine African head”. She is a two-time nominee for the Irving Layton Award in Poetry from Concordia University, which she was awarded in 2020, and she was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Spoken Word Award in 2024. Faith was the inaugural recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers, under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze, and was an honourable mention for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pavlick Prize, granted to a poet with an outstanding portfolio and significant commitment to Canadian poetry communities.
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.
Launched in winter 2023, the LCP Spoken Word Award consists of two awards, presented annually to two poets for a single poem or suite of poems up to 10 minutes in length.
The $500 LCP Spoken Word Award is awarded twice annually: once in the summer/fall with the League's Summer Lovin' Contests, and once in the winter/spring with the League's Cold Moon Contests.
With this award, the League will celebrate the wide range of styles represented within the spoken word genre, from dub poetry to spoken word poetry to sound poetry and beyond. By running twice per year, this prize will recognize two poems or suites of poems that represent two distinct schools of spoken word poetry.
This award has been created to celebrate the specific art of spoken word and performance poetry: that is, poems that have been constructed with the specific intent of being read or performed aloud. Submissions and the artist’s statement should reflect this intent. Please note that spoken word and performance poetry do not need to be memorized to be performed.