The Winner of the 2023 Award is Nicholas Dawson, D.M. Bradford, and Brick Books!
Celebrating the 2023 Shortlist
Cyclettes, Book*hug, Tree Abraham
“Aging is like this—as experiences expose more of the world, my annexed wisdoms shrink back into naiveties relative to the ever-expanding whole.” Cyclettes is a moving memoir, a mediation on life’s circularities, the forms, patterns, stories and stages that hold us, dis/connect us, and propel us into motion, a travelogue where topography and typography reveal the nuances of an unscripted life.
– Chantal Gibson
House Within a House, Nicholas Dawson (translated by D.M. Bradford)
To get out of these loops, everything is worth a try, to break free of painful thoughts and silences, of the cages we build ourselves, everything is fair game.” Weaving essay, poem and photograph, House Within a House invites the reader to dwell within the walls of depression, to observe the mind, to reorient the body, to listen in the cracks, to touch the light, and to consider what beauty might emerge from the shadows.
CHANTAL GIBSON
Dream of No One but Myself, Darby Minott Bradford
Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe, Knopf Canada
The proximity startles me. So close to slavery that when my father was two, Harriet Tubman was still alive. Time collapses in on itself; it is not linear; it is a boomerang.” Ordinary Notes is a memoir situated within a brutal, ongoing history of antiblackness and a vibrant archive of Black intellectualism and creativity, a questioning voice in conversation and creation with itself and others, each page a looking back and a turn toward liberation.
– CHANTAL GIBSON
2023 Judge
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and cultural institution across Canada and the US.
Gibson published her debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press) in January 2019. Currently on curriculum readings lists across the country, this genre blurring collection is Gibson’s creative response to her own encounters with racism in the classroom. How She Read won the 2020 Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for best book in BC, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021), was long-listed for the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and named a CBC Best Book in 2021. This hybrid text presents a graphic response to the year 2020 bringing a critical lens to the historical representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media.
Recipient of the 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Canada’s prestigious post-secondary teaching award, Gibson teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.