Ploy Jamroon is the 2023 first place winner of the Janice Colbert Poetry Award.
Created by award-winning poet Janice Colbert in 2012, the Janice Colbert Poetry Award honours SCS learners who have created a piece of poetry that moves us.
Janice, who is an SCS Creative Writing Certificate earner, helps us celebrate the journey towards creative discovery through her generous award. This annual honour is valued at $1,000, plus two finalist awards of $500 each.
1ST PLACE/$1,000 AWARD WINNER: Ploy Jamroon
Ploy Jamroon is an emerging writer. Raised in Australia, she has lived in Montreal, Kamloops and Ottawa and now calls Toronto her home. She is working on her first poetry collection, a lyrical family montage, set in 1970s rural Thailand. She has been published in The Ex-Puritan and Ricepaper Magazine.
“Ploy Jamroon's confident poems sparkle with wit and power. They switch effortlessly from cinematic to drily humorous to philosophical without faltering. These are poems with that rare ability to slow the reader into a heightened sense of awareness of the immediate world, and which richly reward successive rereading.” – Ayesha Chatterjee, poet and Janice Colbert Award juror
FINALISTS/$500 AWARD WINNERS: : Kerri Huffman and Pujita Verma
Kerri Huffman is a Toronto-based writer. Her poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Hart House Review and Taddle Creek Magazine. She completed her Creative Writing Certificate under the mentorship of Liz Howard.
“Kerri Huffman's Juniper enlivens the pleasures and pathologies of contemporary living in verse that sings with the sometimes clashing words and inventories of our material, corporeal, and social realities. Small lists of daily measurements (weight, running distance, standard drinks) are accompanied by rhythmic, lyrical, intimate reflections on what it means to feel desire in the age of brands.” – Stephen Brockwell, poet and Janice Colbert Award juror
Pujita Verma is an Indo-Canadian Poet and Illustrator. Recently, she won the League of Canadian Poets Broadsheet Contest and the 2023 Mississauga Arts Council Emerging Literary Arts Award. Pujita was formerly Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate and a Poetry in Voice National Finalist.
“A transfixing narrative rolls through Pujita Verma’s poems, where the reader is drawn in through a conversational style to a wonderful combination of interior reflection and exterior description. There is a gentle humour as well as melancholy, and it is intriguing to see where this poet goes next in terms of their use of form, which is already quite varied and enjoyable for the reader.” – Alice Burdick, poet and Janice Colbert Award juror
For more information about the Janice Colbert Award, please visit our bursaries and awards page.