Meet the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize readers

CBC

15-05-2025

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Every year, CBC Books enlists the help of established writers and editors from across Canada to read the thousands of entries submitted to our prizes.
Our readers compile the longlist, which is given to the jury. The jury, comprised of Carol Rose GoldenEagle, Paul Vermeersch and Britta B., will then select the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlisted selections. You can meet the readers for the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize below.
The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions until June 1, 2025.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books.
Here are the writers who will be reading the submissions to the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize.
Jes Battis
Battis is a queer autistic writer and teacher at the University of Regina, splitting their time between the prairies and the west coast. They wrote the Occult Special Investigator series and Parallel Parks series. Battis' first novel, Night Child, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. Their novel The Winter Knight was on the Canada Reads 2024 longlist.
I Hate Parties is a collection of 50 poems on Battis' experiences of being queer, autistic and nonbinary. Focusing on the feelings of intense anxiety that come with growing up in the nineties in Canada as a marginalized person, Battis writes of adolescence, queer parties and panic attacks through metaphor and honest verse.
Jessica Bebenek is a queer interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker and educator living between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. Bebenek's writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry.
The poems in No One Knows Us There shows two portraits of early womanhood. The first, a devoted granddaughter responding to needs in hospital hallways, the second, the same woman ten years older, looking at her younger self with compassion and hopes for healing.
Brandi Bird
Bird is an Indigiqueer writer from Treaty 1 territory who is currently studying at the University of British Columbia. Their poems have been featured in various publications such as Catapult and Room Magazine. The All + Flesh is their first book.
The All + Flesh is a debut collection that explores both internal and external cultural landscapes and lineages from the perspective of a Saulteaux, Cree and Métis writer. The All + Flesh won the 2024 Indigenous Voices Award for poetry and was shortlisted for two League of Canadian Poets prizes.
Kayla Czaga
Kayla Czaga is also the author of For Your Safety Please Hold On and Dunk Tank. For Your Safety Please Hold On won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives in Victoria and served as the online poetry mentor for Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio.
Midway is a poetry collection that explores the writer's grief in the aftermath of her parents' deaths. The poems travel from the underworld to London's Tate Modern in a way that's both comforting and disconcerting.
Jessica Hiemstra
Jessica Hiemstra is a poet, artist and designer from Gunning Cove, Nova Scotia. Her previous works of poetry include the collections The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle and Apologetic for Joy.
In Blood Root, Hiemstra reflects on her dual upbringing in Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone). Through a blend of poetry, diary entries and drawings, she touches on themes of land, belonging and identity — meditating on the impact of colonialism in these places.
Nathanael Jones
Nathanael Jones is an Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer and artist. Born in Montreal, he holds degrees from NSCAD University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jones is the author of the poetry collection Aqueous and two chapbooks, ATG and La Poésie Caraïbe. His work has been exhibited and performed across North America and the United Kingdom.
In Aqueous Jones addresses the post-colonial realities of the Black diaspora and how they affect the concepts of identity, place and community. Organized in three main poem sequences, the poet expresses the personal and collective experiences of being Afro-Caribbean Canadian.
Cassandra Myers (My'z)
Cassandra Myers is a queer, non-binary and disabled South Asian and Italian performance poet and counsellor from Toronto. Raised in the slam poetry community for seven years, they have earned titles such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion. As she transitioned to the written word, her work has won the ARC Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year Award 2021 and the Reader's Choice Award.
Myers received the inaugural Lillian Allen Prize for spoken word poetry. Their first collection of poems, Smash the Headlights, is forthcoming from Write Bloody North Publishing.
Sasenarine Persaud
Born in Guyana, Sasenarine Persaud has published essays in various journals about the term he originated, Yogic Realism. He is the author of 15 books of prose and poetry. He has lived in Canada and now makes his home in Florida. His forthcoming poetry collection is A Scent of India.
His previous collection is Mattress Makers where Persaud explores his Indian roots through language, traditions, music and paying homage to beloved writers.
Jane Shi
Jane Shi is a writer and poet based in B.C. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Blog and Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry. Shi graduated from the Writer's Studio Online program at Simon Fraser University and StoryStudio Chicago. She is the winner of The Capilano Review's 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest.
echolalia echolalia a collection of poems focus on the body politic and the experiences of being queer, disabled and in the diaspora. Reflecting on her own identities, author Jane Shi writes about chosen family and resisting colonial projects and ideologies that seek to dehumanize.
Spenser Smith
Spenser Smith is a Winnipeg-based poet and photographer. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Geist, Prairie Fire, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and works as a marketing copywriter at the University of Manitoba.
A brief relief from hunger explores survival and tenderness in the midst of B.C.'s toxic drug crisis. Through poems about addiction, recovery and loss, the collection responds to public stigma and finds moments of comfort in fast food restaurants and a grandmother's cabbage rolls.
Sarain Frank Soonias
Sarain Frank Soonias is a Cree/Ojibwe writer and artist. His work has appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine, Canadian Literature Review, Carousel, Carte Blanche and Filling Station, among others. is Soonias's debut poetry book. He currently lives in Red Deer, Alta.
All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a collection of poems that searches through family history and sheds light on intergenerational trauma and how it impacts Indigenous voices. Bringing together fragmented memories, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain invites strength, beauty and intensity.
Ben von Jagow
Ben von Jagow is a Ottawa-based poet and writer. His work has been featured in Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire and The Antigonish Review, among others. His debut poetry collection is Goalie and includes the poems that longlisted to the CBC Poetry Prize in 2020.