Some Canadian Poetry Prizes Announced

Congratulations to the Winners of the Pat Lowther & Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards

The winners of the 2012 Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards were announced on Saturday, June 16, at a special event at the LCP Poetry Fest and Conference in Saskatoon, SK. Yi-Mei Tsiang was the winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her book Sweet Devilry (Oolichan Books), and Sue Goyette was the winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for outskirts (Brick Books).

Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsiang (Oolichan Books)

Judges’ Comments:

This book of fine and graceful poems sweeps the reader toward birth and death with equal grace. “My daughter, on a bed/ of leaves, as if she had fallen/from the sky.” In Visit, she writes of her dead father:

He smelled of apples, an autumn of leaves

for skin. I remember you like this, I said,

a harvest—an orchard of a man.

He opened his shirt, plucked a plum

From his lungs and held it out to me.

Everything, he said, is a way of remembering.

And so Yi-Mei Tsiang helps us remember: her joy, her daughter, her grief, her father.

Bio: Yi-Mei Tsiang is the author of Flock of Shoes (Annick Press, 2010) and The Mermaid and Other Fairy Tales (Leaf Press, 2010). She has two forthcoming books for children and her work has been sold and translated internationally. She has published poetry extensively in Canadian journals, and has appeared in several anthologies. She is currently completing UBC’s MFA program, and works as a mentor to aspiring writers through UBC’s Booming Ground and Queen’s University’s Enrichment Studies Department. Yi-Mei lives in Kingston with her husband and young daughter. She drew from her own experiences as a mother in the creation of the poems in Sweet Devilry.

outskirts by Sue Goyette (Brick Books)

Judges Comments:

Sue Goyette’s poems are immediately inviting. She brings to her work a confident voice, fresh conversational language, energetic narrative style and a sure rhythms. Her unflinching attention to both the fraught territory of family life and the wider realm of the natural world garners material rich in tension and vitality. The resulting poems do not harangue, but speak with conviction, intelligence and a compassion so genuine the reader feels awed and implicated. Soaring above the details of description, narrative and imagery, these poems consistently demonstrate the clarity and wisdom of the poet’s vision and her mature craftsmanship.

Bio: Sue Goyette has published two books of poems, The True Names of Birds (Brick Books) and Undone (Brick Books), and has been nominated for the Governor General’s award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Plantos/Acron Award for Poetry and the Dartmouth Book Award. Her novel, Lures (HarperCollins), was short-listed for the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. She teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University. She also participates in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Mentorship and Writers in Schools programs and has taught at Sage Hill, the Banff Centre Wired Writing Studio and the Blue Heron Workshop.