CBC Books, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partners the Canada Council for the Arts and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, have announced the finalists for the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize.
The finalists are:
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Hold for the Next Available Me by Jennifer Manuel (Duncan, B.C.)
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Mice, Toads, Peacocks by Brad Aaron Modlin (Montreal)
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Mixed Girl as Cosmogonic Myth by Jordan Redekop-Jones (Vancouver)
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Northern Girls by Carly Straker (Yellowknife)
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Memory Palace of the One-Track Oracle by Jan A. Wozniak (Toronto)
The entries were selected from more than 3,200 submissions received from across Canada. The public can read the shortlisted entries on cbcbooks.ca. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Wednesday, November 19.
The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize jurors are Carol Rose GoldenEagle, Paul Vermeersch and Britta B.
Carol Rose GoldenEagle is a Cree and Dene writer, poet, playwright and musician. She was named the Saskatchewan Poet Laureate from 2021-2023. GoldenEagle’s previous books include the poetry collection Hiraeth, Essential Ingredients and Stations of the Crossed. Paul Vermeersch is a poet, artist and editor from Toronto. Vermeersch holds an MFA in creative writing for which he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal. His poetry collections include The Reinvention of the Human Hand, Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy, Shared Universe and NMLCT: Poems. Britta Badour, better known as Britta B., is an artist, public speaker and poet living in Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation. Badour was among the finalists for 2024 Trillium Book Awards for poetry for Wires that Sputter.
The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be published on the CBC Books website. The four other finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and will be published on CBC Books.
Visit cbcbooks.ca for the complete CBC Poetry Prize shortlist or for more information on the CBC Literary Prizes.