Eva bartends on Queen West in Toronto and just this spring published a book of poetry with Mansfield Press called Rotten Perfect Mouth. Sometimes she gets to run off and cook on tallships or canoe in Temagami. She has also worked as a translator for Legal Aid, a nanny, a woefully subpar drywaller, a bicycle messenger and a cardboard-folder on an assembly line. She sometimes tells people that Keith Richards is her boyfriend, and they believe her, because they have never heard of the Rolling Stones. Some people have called her a tough read. Other people have called her a tarantula. In her spare time she transcribes the fictional conversations of pigeons and crabs and makes unsolicited translations of popular song lyrics. She will send haikus to your home by postcard. She often gets asked for directions, and would like to buy you a beer.

Some people have called her a tough read. Other people have called her a tarantula. In her spare time she transcribes the fictional conversations of pigeons and crabs and makes unsolicited translations of popular song lyrics.

2015 Prize Judge

2015 Editorial Board

Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar and the author of the poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body and A Hundred Silences, and the monograph Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid. Her short story “The Year of Sleeping Badly” was selected as one of the “Best Short Stories of South Africa’s Democracy” in 2014. Baderoon has also received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry and held the Guest Writer Fellowship from the Nordic Africa Institute. She is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, and teaches Women’s Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Kate Clanchy’s three collections Slattern, Samarkand, and Newborn, have recently been gathered into a Selected Poems, published by Picador. In addition to Forward, Saltire and Somerset Maugham Prizes for her Poetry, she has won the Writer’s Guild Award, The VS Prichett Prize, and the BBC National Short Story Award for her prose. Her novel, Meeting the English, was shortlisted for the Costa Prize in 2013, and a collection of short stories, The Not-Dead and the Saved, will be published in 2015.

Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator and essayist, and editor of two best-selling poetry anthologies, Against Forgetting and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (co-edited with Duncan Wu). Her poetry books include Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History and Blue Hour. Her honors include the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm, and The Academy of American Poets Fellowship in Poetry for 2014. She has taught writing and literature for forty years, and has given poetry readings around the world. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she also directs The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

Amanda Jernigan is the author of two books of poetry, Groundwork (2011) and All the Daylight Hours (2013). The first was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award and included in the National Public Radio’s list of best books of the year; the second was named a best book of the year in the National Post. She has published in the States in Poetry magazine, in England’s PN Review, and in numerous Canadian literary journals. She is the editor of The Essential Richard Outram (2011) and author of a monograph on the poetry of Peter Sanger.

Anthony Lawrence has published fourteen books of poems, the most recent being Signal Flare (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013). His books and individual poems have won many awards, including the New South Wales Premier’s Award, the Queensland Premier’s Award, the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize and the Blake Poetry Prize. He teaches Creative Writing and Writing Poetry at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Queensland, and lives on the far north coast of New South Wales.

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet, playwright, essayist and scholar. He has authored 18 books of poetry and two books of selected poems. Among his many prizes are the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Poetry Prize, the Cadbury/ANA Poetry Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Noma Award (Africa’s most prestigious Book Award), the Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African Poetry (generally regarded as Africa’s highest poetry prize), and the Fonlon/Nichols Award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.” He is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her essays on Caribbean literature have appeared in MaComere, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Small Axe, Anthurium, TOUT MOUN and BIM. She edited, with Barbara Lalla, Beyond Borders: Cross Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon (UWI Press 2009) and Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul (Ian Randle, 2010). Her poetry collections include: Between the Fence and the Forest (Peepal Tree Press, 2002), Approaching Sabbaths (Peepal Tree Press, 2009), Redemption Rain (TSAR, 2011) and Ground Level (Peepal Tree Press, 2014). She has one collection of short stories, Songster and Other Stories (Peepal Tree Press, 2007). Approaching Sabbaths was awarded a Casa de las Américas Prize in 2010.

K. Satchidanandan is perhaps the most translated of contemporary Indian poets, having 23 collections of translation in 19 languages. His book While I Write: New and Selected Poems (Harper-Collins) came out in 2011 and Misplaced Things and Other Poems (Sahitya Akademi) in 2014. Satchidanandan writes poetry in Malayalam, and prose in both Malayalam and English and has more than 20 collections of poetry besides several books of travel, plays and criticism including five books in English on Indian literature. He is a Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi and has won 31 literary awards. Satchidanandan has a Knighthood of the Order of Merit from the Government of Italy and an India-Poland Friendship Medal from the Government of Poland. He has also been twice in the list of the Nobel Prize probables.

Michael Schmidt is a poet, literary historian and teacher. Lives of the Poets (1999), The First Poets (2004) and The Novel: A Biography (2014) are his main critical works. Collected Poems and The Stories of my Life bring together his poems. Born in Mexico and educated in the United States and England, he runs Carcanet Press and edits PN Review. He has taught in Manchester and Glasgow and is currently writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Bruce Taylor is a two-time winner of the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. He has published four collections of poetry: Getting On with the Era (1987), Cold Rubber Feet (1989), Facts (1998) and No End in Strangeness (2011).  His other interests include lutherie, boatbuilding, and the taxonomy of ciliated protozoa. He lives in Wakefield, Quebec.