The Winner of the 2024 Award is Armand Garnet Ruffo for his book The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow from Wolsak & Wynn.
Judge Steve Collis says of it, “In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, Armand Garnet Ruffo transforms a libretto (still embedded at the heart of this book) into a fully-formed documentary poem, effortlessly blending production notes and an extended reflection on the process of writing and recovering Indigenous history. This is a story of the First World War, and one Indigenous Canadian’s spiritual journey and political awakening. But it is also a wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of war writ large, from the bible to Gaza and the “war against the very planet that sustains us,” tracing a path that connects the unmarked graves of residential schools and Great War battlefields. I don’t really know how Ruffo does it—balancing all that he brings into focus here—but he certainly does it, with wisdom and humour, insight and poetry. Like veteran and activist Francis Pegahmagabow himself, we are invited to “take a piece of one of the branches” of this book, place it in our mouths, “and become the grey earth.”
Armand Garnet Ruffo is an Anishnaabe writer from northern Ontario and a member of the Chapleau (Fox Lake) Cree First Nation. A recipient of an Honorary Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, he is recognized as a major contributor to both Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His publications Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (2014) and Treaty #(2019) were finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. He teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Celebrating the 2024 Shortlist
Kathryn Mockler, Anecdotes, Book*hug Press
Kathryn Mockler is the author of five poetry books and the story collection, Anecdotes. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis and runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone. She teaches screenwriting and fiction in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.
Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Vol. 1 and 2: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island, McClelland & Stewart
Kent Monkman is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. A member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba, Canada), he lives and works in Dish With One Spoon Territory (Toronto, Canada). Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle often appears in his work as a time-travelling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. His painting and installation works are held in the public collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Hirshhorn Museum; National Gallery of Canada; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; Art Gallery of Ontario; and La maison rouge, Paris.
Gisèle Gordon
Gisèle Gordon is a settler media artist and writer based in Dish With One Spoon Territory (Toronto, Canada). Her solo work includes the feature-length documentary The Tunguska Project (Best Feature Length Film at the Planet in Focus Film Festival, 2005), the video installations Crosscurrent (2013 Moscow Biennale), and projection/performance piece The Land that Dreams.
Armand Garnet Ruffo, The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, Wolsak & Wynn
Armand Garnet Ruffo is an Anishnaabe writer from northern Ontario and a member of the Chapleau (Fox Lake) Cree First Nation. A recipient of an Honorary Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, he is recognized as a major contributor to both Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His publications Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (2014) and Treaty #(2019) were finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. He teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
2024 Judge
Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle, the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, will be published in 2024. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.