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2019 Long Poem Prize Winners:
Erin Soros and John Elizabeth Stintzi

Congratulations to Erin Soros (Toronto, Ontario) and John Elizabeth Stintzi (Kansas City, Missouri) on winning The Malahat Review's 2019 Long Poem Prize. Both winners will receive an award of $1,000, and their winning poems will be published in our Summer 2019 issue. Their poems were chosen from over 225 entries by contest judges Jordan Abel, Sonnet L'Abbé, and Gillian Sze.

Of Erin Soros's poem, "Weight," the judges said: "This wise, humorous poem about a weightlifter’s gym practice and grief creates intersections between physical exertion, emotional and material loads, the gendering of bodies, and what it means to 'push through' to survive. The speaker ensures that we feel the weight of her body as much as we feel the weight of her language, in all of their intimacy and extraordinary strength. Brilliantly conceptualized, the poem offers us the tough, honest image of 'pushing to failure' in order to rebuild."

Of John Elizabeth Stintzi's poem, "Cold Dying Black Wet Cold Early Thing," the judges said: "This poem witnesses the brutality of calving season with such visceral tenderness that one can only hold one’s gut and gasp aloud. It grabs the reader with its strange, emotionally and relationally complex opening image, and its recurrence is one that the reader both clings to and dreads. Narratively enthralling and achingly rendered, it illustrates animal life in its most delicate and staccato form."

A settler from Vancouver, Erin Soros has published fiction and nonfiction in international anthologies and journals, including Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Indiana Review, ELQ, Geist, Prism, West Coast Line, Fiddlehead and enRoute.  Her stories have been produced for the CBC and BBC as winners of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Award for the Short Story.  Articles weaving psychoanalysis, philosophy, oral history, and autobiography have appeared in such journals as differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and The Canadian Journal of Women and the Law.  New work has appeared in Literatures of Madness and in Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness. Soros has been a visiting writer at four universities, most recently the University of Cambridge.  This year she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. 

Throughout her life, people have advised Erin Soros to focus on one thing. 

Look for an interview with Erin Soros in our May Malahat lite e-newsletter.

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary poet and novelist who was raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their writing has received support from The Watermill Center as well as the Canada Council for the Arts, and a selection can be found (or is forthcoming) in Black Warrior Review, The Puritan, Humber Literary Review, Ploughshares, and their poetry chapbook The Machete Tourist (knife | fork | book, 2018). They currently live in Kansas City, MO, with their partner. They can be found on Twitter @stintzi.

Look for an interview with John Elizabeth Stintzi in our May Malahat lite.

We would also like to congratulate the Long Poem Prize finalists:

Sanita Fejzić, "Affection for Otherness"
Laurie Graham, "Commuter"
Rahat Kurd, "Alkohol"
Alycia Pirmohamed, "In Every Story, A Woman Flees to the Woods"
Titilope Sonuga, "Missing"

We gratefully acknowledge all of our supporters