Congratulations to the winners of the 2019 Janice Colbert Poetry Award! Created by award-winning poet Janice Colbert, a Creative Writing Certificate earner, this award is open to SCS learners who have taken at least one creative writing course in the previous year. Established in 2012, this annual award is valued at $1,000, plus two finalist awards of $500 each.
$1000 Winner: Erin Conway-Smith for After Mining
Erin Conway-Smith is a journalist reporting on southern Africa for The Economist, and other publications. Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, she has lived in Johannesburg since 2009. She was previously based in Beijing. Her reporting has appeared in publications such as The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and The Independent.
Juror’s citation:
The poems in After Mining collide to create a vivid and devastating portrait of the mining industries in South Africa. The poet re-visions the extracted and stripped landscape and the people who live there using bold and dynamic language of place and identity. In these poems fracture reigns, and both land and language are opened up in ways that are brutal and necessary to read.
-Hazel Millar, Co-Publisher, Book*hug Press
$500 Winner: Melany Franklin for Triptych
Melany Franklin is a former Bay Street litigator, now part-time lawyer with the YMCA of Greater Toronto. She is writing her first novel, thanks in no small part to Dennis Bock’s Novel Writing Workshop at SCS, and ongoing encouragement from her writing groups, the Sceniuses, the Ladies of Balmoral, and Stillpoint writers. Melany is currently adjunct faculty to Osgoode Law School’s Certificate in Human Rights: Theory and Practice, and previously taught labour and employment law at Woodsworth College, University of Toronto. Melany has been published in the Law Society’s Special Lectures Series (2013) and her high school year book. Her absolute favourite poem is Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Sunlight at Sherbourne & Bloor.
Juror’s citation:
In her Triptych of poems, Melany Franklin demonstrates a light touch; her images are unhurried and yet precise, a ‘gentle tumble’ of perceptions that manage, very quietly, to dramatize grief. No mean accomplishment, that these pieces hold the darkness so softly, like a sleeping bird in hand.
-John O’Neill, poet
$500 Winner: Jane Macdonald for Bread Creek Runs Under Our Village and Other Poems
Jane Macdonald lived in California for fifteen years, where she was a student of the poet Ellen Bass, and where she was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest under her teacher, poet Angie Boissevain. Jane has participated in workshops with Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Frank Gaspar, and Mark Doty. In 2009, Jane returned to Canada, where she now lives in Prince Edward County and is enrolled in the Poetry Certificate Program at SCS.
Juror’s citation:
This collection of poetry vibrantly captures the idyllic life of sound and shape, of animals and family, air and water. Macdonald expertly uses concrete language and imagery to hold both the universal and the local on the page. Swift and subtle in their immersive nature, these poems highlight the smallest moments to paint a pastoral community in words, excellent to the ear and eye.
-Terese Mason Pierre, poet