Posts

Showing posts with the label griffin prize

Poets Chasing the Money - Canada's biggest poetry purse, the Griffin

Image
Caribbean Canadian Poet Kaie Kellough  Makes $65K Prize Shortlist! Caribbean Canadian poet Kaie Kellough has made it into to the finals of a very very rich race.  He is one of three Canadian authors in the running for the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Prize, the country’s richest annual poetry contest. If Kellough’s book Magnetic Equator is chosen later this spring, he will take home a purse of $65,000.00. He is up against Chantal Gibson’s How She Read and Doyali Islam’s Heft. Kellough’s family is originally from Guyana. He was born in Vancouver, raised in Calgary, and now lives in Montreal.  In addition to Magnetic Equator he is the author of the novels Dominoes at the Crossroads, and Accordéon, (finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award), two additional books of poetry, Lettricity and Maple Leaf Rag, and two albums, Vox:Versus and Creole Continuum. The annual Griffin Prize has a jury panel of three poetry experts. Ireland’s Paula Meehan, Jamaica’s Kei Mill

Part two in a story about Canadian poets chasing $65K prize

Image
Vancouver poet in the running for the Griffin Prize with a book about Black Womanhood Last week the Caribbean Camera told readers about Guyanese Canadian poet Kale Kellough and his book Magnetic Equator that is in the consideration for the $65,000 Griffin Prize. This week, as part two of the story, we introduce you to Chantel Gibson the author of How She Read . It too is in the shortlist for Canada’s biggest and richest annual poetry prize. Chantal Gibson is an artist and an awa rd-winning teacher. She teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University. She lives Vancouver with deep roots in Nova Scotia’s black community. How She Read is Gibson’s debut book of poetry. Her poems challenge historic representations of Black womanhood and Otherness in the Canadian cultural imagination. How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and