Being a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize can jumpstart your literary career.
Need proof? Here are books that were written by former CBC Poetry Prize winners and finalists that are being published this year.
The 2026 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until June 1 at 4:59 p.m. ET.
You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems. The submission will be judged as a whole and must be a maximum of 600 words (including titles).
There is no minimum word requirement.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will have their work published on CBC Books.
Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
Barefoot Gringo by George Bowering
Barefoot Gringo is a book by George Bowering. (UBC Press, Linda Crosfield)
Barefoot Gringo presents snapshots of daily life in a small Mexican fishing village through George Bowering’s Canadian eyes. The memoir touches upon his passions for the arts, politics, growth — both personal and professional — as well as his fondness for travelling in Latin America.
Barefoot Gringo will be available May 12.
Bowering is a prolific poet, novelist, historian and biographer from British Columbia. He has written more than 100 books. He was Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate. He won the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2011.
In 1984, Bowering received second place in the CBC Poetry Prize for his work Delayed Mercy: Late Night Poems.
Weird Babies by Jaclyn Desforges
Weird Babies is a short story collection by Jaclyn Desforges. (The Porcupine’s Quill)
Weird Babies is a collection of short stories devoted entirely to tales of weird babies, representing the tender parts that everyone has inside them.
Jaclyn Desforges is a Hamilton, Ont.-based poet and picture book author. She is the author of Danger Flower, winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry, and Why Are You So Quiet?. Desforges is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award.
Desforges was shortlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize for her poem I Can Communicate If Communication Is Another Form Of Sinking.
Yield by Jaime Forsythe
Yield is a poetry book by Jaime Forsythe. (Wolsak & Wynn, Cooked Photography)
Yield is one long poem that reflects on the liminal spaces of the postpartum body and the environment, especially the sea. The couplets detail both the banal and the extraordinary elements of motherhood and places them against the Maritime coastline.
Jaime Forsythe’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Arc, EVENT, Grain, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Ampersand Review and This Magazine, among others. Her previous books are I Heard Something and Sympathy Loophole. She lives in Nova Scotia.
Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham
Calling It Back to Me is a book of poetry by Laurie D. Graham. (McClelland & Stewart)
Calling It Back to Me traces Laurie D. Graham’s family history following her great-grandparents’ decisions to leave their homelands and settle in North America. Graham reckons with the colonization in her history, and ponders what gets left behind and what gets passed down through changing language and fractured memory.
Graham is a poet, editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine, a journal of literary non-fiction based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry in Canada. She lives in Peterborough, Ont., in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg.
Graham was shortlisted for the 2014 CBC Poetry Prize.
LISTEN | Laurie D. Graham discusses her poetry collection on Ontario Morning:
Ontario Morning8:34BOOKS: Laurie D Graham on “Calling It Back To Me”
Endings: Encounters with Extinction by Neil Griffin
Endings is a book by Neil Griffin. (House of Anansi Press, Sonja Pinto)
What does the extinction of other species really mean for humanity? That is the question that naturalist and poet Neil Griffin seeks to answer in Endings: Encounters with Extinction. In the book, he traces a history of some of the dead species, the nearly dead and those who are still living against all odds.
Endings will be available Sept. 22.
Griffin is a writer and naturalist based in Alberta. He turned to writing after leaving the fieldwork as a wildlife biologist. He now holds an MFA from the University of Victoria, where he is an instructor in the Department of Writing.
Griffin made the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist for Canadian Immigration Services Citizenship Exam.
Evacuations by Kevin Irie
Evacuations is a poetry collection by Kevin Irie. (Kevin Irie, University of Alberta Press)
Evacuations is a poetic documentary on the Japanese Canadian internment in British Columbia during the Second World War. Kevin Irie’s writing highlights the dehumanizing and racist nature of the Canadian government policies during that time. The poems give voice to those who have been silenced in order to preserve the accounts of their devastating stories.
Irie is a Japanese-Canadian poet from Toronto. His work is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2026. His book Viewing Tom Thomson: A Minority Report was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and the Toronto Book Award. In 2024, he won first prize in Grain Magazine’s poetry contest, second prize in Prairie Fire’s poetry contest and third prize in The New Quarterly’s poetry contest.
Most recently Irie made the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Assimilation For Interned Japanese-Canadians. He was previously longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2017 and in 2009.
Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens
Who Else in the Dark Headed There is a collection of poems by Garth Martens. (Biblioasis)
Set in Alberta in the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man searching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming. The fragmented poems showcase an urgent relationship with language that is sensory, emotive and captivating.
Garth Martens’ first book, Prologue for the Age of Consequence, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the 2011 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry has appeared in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead and Best Canadian Poetry. He lives in Victoria, BC.
In 2013, Martens longlisted twice for the CBC Poetry Prize for Rote Welter and Seizures.
nightstead by David Martin
nightstead is a poetry collection by David Martin. (Francis A. Willey, Palimpsest Press)
nightstead serves as an elegy for poet David Martin’s younger brother, who died by suicide at the age of 23. The poems mix childhood recollections with anguished perceptions resulting in a haunting, deeply personal poetic memoir.
Martin is the author of the poetry collections Limited Verse, Kink Bands and Tar Swan, which was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize.
Martin won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2014 for Tar Swan.
LISTEN | David Martin discusses his latest poetry collection on Daybreak Alberta:
Daybreak Alberta10:32Calgary poet reflects on the next generation of poets and his latest book during National Poetry Month
edgeless by rob mclennan
rob mclennan is the author of edgeless. (Submitted by Caitlin Press)
In edgeless, rob mclennan captures everyday intimacies through letters to loved ones. He writes notes to his wife in Banff, a call-and-response with Denver poet Julie Carr in the depths of the COVID pandemic, and elegizes his friend Barry McKinnon, the late poet from Prince George, B.C. The letters travel across space and time and illuminate the extraordinary in the ordinary.
edgeless will be available June 19.
mclennan is the author of more than 50 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. He won the John Newlove Poetry Prize and has been shortlisted multiple times for the Archibald Lampman Award. His most recent works include the poetry collection World’s End, and a book of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties. He lives in Ottawa.
mclennan longlisted twice for the CBC Poetry Prize, in 2017 and 2012.
LISTEN | rob mclennan discusses his poetry on All In A Day:
11:20Ottawa Book Awards Nominee #1: rob mclennan’s ON BEAUTY
Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become by Alycia Pirmohamed
Shorelines is a book by Alycia Pirmohamed. (Alycia Pirmohamed, Canongate Books)
In Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become, Alycia Pirmohamed writes about how place and identity intertwine. As a young Muslim woman migrating from Midwestern Canada to East Africa, from the Pacific Northwest to the British Isles, she carries hidden histories across borders and generations.
Shorelines will be available August 13.
Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the poetry collection Another Way To Split Water and the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, a co-organizer of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Program. Shorelines is her nonfiction debut.
Pirmohamed won the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize for her collection of poems, Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih.
LISTEN | Alycia Pirmohamed on the impact of the CBC Poetry Prize:
CBC Books5:38Alycia Pirmohamed on what winning the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize has meant for her career
Hybridity as a Phantom Body by Jordan Redekop-Jones
Hybridity as a Phantom Body is a chapbook by Jordan Redekop-Jones. (Anstruther Press, Jordan Redekop-Jones)
Hybridity as a Phantom Body examines the ways in which grief, love and healing can co-exist in a liminal space. Stepping into an in-between world full of nostalgia, homesickness and self discovery, the poems strike a balance between the tangible and the philosophical.
Jordan Redekop-Jones is a mixed Indigenous/Anglo-Indian writer from Vancouver. She is the winner of the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for Poetry and was a recipient of a 2024 Indigenous Voices Award in the unpublished poetry category.
Redekop-Jones won the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize for her poem Mixed Girl as Cosmogonic Myth.
LISTEN | Jordan Redekop-Jones on Bookends with Mattea Roach:
Bookends with Mattea Roach16:00This poem is straight out of a dream
Sublunary by Lisa Richter
Sublunary is a book by Lisa Richter. (University of Alberta Press, Kenzie Allen)
In Sublunary, poet Lisa Richter explores what it’s like to live under the moon, in a world that is both heartbreaking and wonderful. The poems interweave moments of absurdity and awe while advocating for an ethics of care, solidarity and compassion for others and also ourselves.
Richter is the author of three books of poetry, including Nautilus and Bone, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and the Robert Kroetsch Award. Her work has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
Richter was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2015.
Rush of Wingspan by Eleonore Schönmaier
Rush of Wingspan is a book by Eleonore Schönmaier. (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jorge López-Escribano)
Rush of Wingspan explores life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. The poems explore a love of nature, art, animals, cycling and music. Contrasting with the poet’s visions on human rights and revealing beauty and loss in equal measure.
Eleonore Schönmaier has won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, the National Broadsheet Contest and the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize (second place). Her poetry has been widely anthologized in the US and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry.
Schönmaier made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist for Northern Childhood.
