“Portrait of Me Incensing the Mushrooms Channelling Demeter” by kizziah burton

2024 Jury

Caroline Bird has seven poetry collections published by Carcanet. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award for “sustained excellence across a body of work.” Her selected poems, Rookie, was published in 2022. 

Danielle Legros Georges  is a poet, translator, and editor whose work has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the  Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and  the Boston Foundation. Appointed Boston’s poet laureate in 2014, she served in the role through 2019. Her books include  Maroon,  The Dear Remote Nearness of You, and  Island Heart (translations of the Haitian-French poet Ida Faubert). She is editor, with Artress Bethany White, of the 2023 anthology  Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters.   daniellelegrosgeorges.com.  @daniellelegrosgeorges.

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. He is the author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His most recent titles include World’s End (ARP Books, 2023), essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). An editor and publisher, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. 

Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning Australian poet. His prizes include The Moth Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Writings Awards, the Magma Judge’s Prize and the Welsh International Poetry Competition.  Damen's poems have been highly commended for the Forward Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Damen has been a judge of the Val Vallis Award.  He has been published in the journals of more than five countries, including Meanjin, Arc Poetry Magazine and New Ohio Review.  His collection, Animals With Human Voices, is available through Recent Work Press. www.dameno.org. @damen_o.

Sadiqa de Meijer has written the poetry collections Leaving Howe Island and The Outer Wards, and the language memoir alfabet/alphabet. Her work was awarded the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc's Poem of the Year award, and a Governor General's Literary Award, and has been published in Poetry Magazine, The Walrus, Brick Magazine, and Poetry London. She is currently poet laureate of Katarokwi/Kingston. www.sadiqademeijer.com. @sadiqademeijer. Photo credit: Max Montalvo. 

Kaie Kellough is a poet, sound performer, and fiction writer. His collection Magnetic Equator won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. His short story collection Dominoes at the Crossroads was published to national acclaim. Kaie has written plays for television and librettos for large musical ensembles. His sound performances have been produced internationally. www.kaie.ca.  @kkaaiiee.

Andrew McMillan  was born in Barnsley in 1988. His debut collection of poetry,  physical, was  the only poetry book to ever win the  Guardian  First Book Award; it was also awarded a Somerset Maugham award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and in 2019 was voted as one of the Top 25 Poetry Books of the Past 25 Years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection,  playtime, won the inaugural Polari Prize. A third collection,  pandemonium, was published in 2021 and in 2022 he co-edited the acclaimed anthology  100 Queer Poems, which was shortlisted in the British Book Awards. He is professor of contemporary writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections  What is Otherwise Infinite  (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award;  The  Möbius  Strip Club of Grief  (Tin House, 2018); and  Someone Else’s Wedding Vows  (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014). She collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of  Antigonick  (New Directions, 2012).  Her work has appeared in many magazines, including  The New Yorker,  The Atlantic,  and  The Nation.  She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House (501c3) where she is editor-at-large for  ITERANT  magazine and  host of  Ode & Psyche Podcast.  bianca-stone.com. @biancastone.

Mai Der Vang is the author of  Yellow Rain  (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with  Afterland  (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in  Tin House, the  American Poetry Review, and  Poetry. She teaches in the  MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State. maidervang.com. @maider_vang.  

Randy Lundy is Cree, Irish, and Norwegian, and is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation, Brochet, MB. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Field Notes for the Self (2020) and Blackbird Song (2018), as well as the chapbook In the Dark Times (2022). Randy teaches at University of Toronto, Scarborough, and serves as series editor for the Oskana Series, University of Regina Press.

Vivek Narayanan’s books are After (New York Review Books / HarperCollins India, 2022), Life and Times of Mr S, and Universal Beach. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14), and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16).  His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Poetry at Sangam, and Granta, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry.  He currently teaches poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he also sits on the boards of the Cheuse International Writers Center and Poetry Daily.

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared The Yale Review, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Geist, AGNI, TriQuarterly, and PRISM International. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, where she teaches creative writing at McGill University.