Category Archives: Awards

DESCANT Congratulates 23 Poets

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Vera| Leave a comment

Further to our blog entry of February 16th, we would like to confirm the names of each poet short listed for this year’s Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem.*

For 2011, our ‘short list’ includes the names of 23 individuals. Their names and poems are as follows:

Wendy Brandts                         Ardent Awakenings

Roger Bell                                Oh Wendy

Barry Butson                            Things I Touch

Terry Ann Carter                       The Call

Joan Crate                                Cherry Jam

Barry Dempster                        A Circle Of White Deck Chairs

Kildare Dobbs                          September 1939

Kate Marshall-Flaherty             Apocalypse of Bees

Susan Glickman                      Things From Which One Never Recovers

Elizabeth Greene                     Planet of the Lost Things

Gillian Harding-Russell             Gerontian Thoughts

Margaret Hollingsworth            Some Sage Said

Sheldon Inkol                          She Does Not Want

Ellen S. Jaffe                           Remembering September Tenth

Ellen S. Jaffe                           Continental Drift

Donna Langevin                      In Lieu of an Obit

Kathy Mac                              Lachesis Descends from the Mountain Alone

Anna Mamcini                        The Treeplanters

Talya Rubin                            Leaving the Island

Renee Sarojini-Saklikar           June 1981

Karen Schnidler                      Brief History

Susan Stenson                       Romantic Poetry

Josh Stewart                          Skeleton Beach

Myna Wallin                          The Self As Both Object And Subject

Descant congratulates each of these poets for their fine contributions to Canadian culture and contemporary literature.

We would also like to thank everyone who participated this year. We invite you all to consider entering our 2012 competition this fall. More details about next year’s event can be found at: http://www.descant.ca/contest.html

* We wish to confirm that all short listed entries will be clearly cited on our blog and website in the future. This information was not included in our previous blog entry, for which we apologize. Staffing changes this January led, regretfully, to a few items ‘slipping through the cracks.’ Again, we apologize for this temporary oversight.

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Posted in Awards, Contests, Descant News, Events, General, Poetry, Readings

Winston Collins Winner and Honourable Mentions of 2011

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Vera| Leave a comment

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On February 8, 2011 Descant announced the winner and two honourable mentions for this year’s 2011 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem at Supermarket, Toronto. The night went off wonderfully with a speech from Descant’s editor-in-chief, Karen Mulhallen. We were lucky enough to have readings from Linda Woolven, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Giovanna Riccio and R. Brian Rigg, as well as our three finalists who also read their winning poems (Pamela Porter read via a uTube video).

The winner of the Winston Collins Prize and $1,000 in prize money was Barbara Schott, with her poem Thin Ice. The judges described this winning poem: “This poet has turned a winter drowning into a rumination on our own personal descent into a cold wet world…’Thin Ice’ works on the surface as an accounting of failure, of childhood promise that is doused and expectations disappointed. Yet the beauty of the world surrounds us, our final breath is full of the sight of it…It is a humble poem about the ego and about ego’s loss, and while we submerge into the icy depths we read the poem – it is about us! – scrawled on the bridge above.”

Honourable mention, winning $250 in prize money, was Carla Hartenberger, with Naked in the Sun. The judges spoke highly of this poem, “By the last words of this poem the reader may be filled with such a sense of loss and heartbreak that they may not be sure whether it was the poem that effected them so… That is because the summer that the poet recalls having spent in her youth with a sweetheart resonates so strongly that it will undoubtedly remind the reader of a summer they too had at some time. The poet uses a breathless, frolicking stream of consciousness to achieve this.”

Honourable mention, also winning $250 prize money, Pamela Porter with The Place of Feathers. The judges said this about her poem: “The author sees a landscape covered in feathers and allows herself to come to the conclusion that it was a multitude of angels that passed this way. This short poem describes the way that the natural world can transport us into the realm of myth and narrative. ‘The Place of Feathers’ takes an arresting moment and essentially arrests it, holding us there to feel that moment over and over again.”

The competition was fierce in its fifth anniversary, approximately 100 submissions came in from across Canada—from Victoria, British Columbia to Chateau Guay, Quebec; from Whitehorse, Yukon to Goulds, Newfoundland; from Canadians living as far away as Australia. Two rounds of judging narrowed the list down to 27 contenders, then to the final three.

The event was also for the launch of D151: Winter Reader, which is available in stores now. Descant would like to congratulate Kathleen Painter on organizing a wonderful evening and producing an enchanting issue. If you would like to have one delivered to your home, then please subscribe today by clicking here

Descant would also like to congratulate the three winners, as well as all those who made it onto the short list. We would also like to thank those came to the event on Tuesday 8th, we hope you had an enjoyable evening.

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Posted in Awards, Contests, Descant News, Events, General, Launches, Poetry

FEBRUARY 8: 2011 DESCANT/Winston Collins Prize

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Drew| Leave a comment
The Descant Arts & Letter Foundation Presents

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An evening celebrating the 2011 Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem!

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Tuesday, February 8th, 2011
7:30 – 10:00 P.M.
Supermarket
268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
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This free event is open to the general public and we encourage the entire Descant community to attend! Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres
will be served and a cash bar available.

Descant will present the 2011 Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem, celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. The prize commemorates the life of Winston Collins, a writer and enthusiastic teacher of literature at the universities of Cincinnati, Princeton and Toronto. The annual prize perpetuates his remarkable talent for encouraging self-expression through writing. The winner receives $1,000 in prize money, and two honourary mentions receive $250 each. They will be chosen by this year’s judges, writers Heather O’Neill and Michael Winters, from 100 submissions that Descant received from poets across Canada.

Please come join us in celebrating this exciting event! Readings and the presentation of the Collins Prize winner and runners-up will be featured.

For more information about the prize and event, visit:
http://descant.ca/contest.html

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Posted in Awards, Events, General, Readings

Ian Brown wins the Trillium Book Award

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Drew| Leave a comment

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Ian Brown — writer, journalist, and past Descant contributor — has been awarded the 23rd Annual Trillium Book Award for his stunning memoir, The Boy in the Moon.

The Boy in the Moon explores the challenges of parenting a child with a severe disability. With a bare and loving sense of honesty, the book “slices through ignorance and trite consolation, leaving the eviscerated skins of relationships, social policy and medical expertise flapping in the wind” (Paula Todd, from The Globe and Mail Books).

Ian joins such writers as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro as a winner of this prestigious literary prize. And this is not the first award for The Boy in the Moon; the book was also recently honoured with the Charles Taylor Prize in literary non-fiction. Descant is thrilled to see Ian’s success with this incredibly deserving work and wish him much more to come!

Congratulations, Ian!

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Posted in Authors, Awards, General

DESCANT Fiction wins Silver at the 2010 National Magazine Awards!

Posted on June 8, 2010 by WordPress| Leave a comment

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We are happy to announce that Adam Lindsay Honsinger‘s short story, “Silence,” has earned a Silver award in the Fiction category at the 33rd annual National Magazine Awards — held last Friday at the Carlu in Toronto.

Steven Heighton’s “Shared Room on Union” won the Gold prize for Fiddlehead journal, while Honsinger’s “Silence” earned a respectable Silver position, beating out other nominated entries from Event, Malahat Review, Matrix Magazine, Prairie Fire and Vancouver Review (you can preview all the nominated works, including “Silence,” here).

“Silence” first appeared in Descant 145: Private Worlds, Public Exigencies, our Summer 2009 issue, an exploration of the boundary between the self and the other. To order a copy of D145, visit our website here.

To download a pdf file of all the 2010 winners and nominations given by the National Magazine Awards Foundation (NMAF), click here.

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Posted in Authors, Awards, Descant News, Fiction, General

DESCANT Fiction nominated for 2010 National Magazine Award!

Posted on May 17, 2010 by WordPress| Leave a comment

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Congratulations to author Adam Lindsay Honsinger, whose short story, Silence, has just been nominated in the 2010 National Magazine Award’s “Fiction” category.

Silence first appeared in Descant 145: Private Worlds, Public Exigencies, our Summer 2009 issue: an exploration of the boundary between the self and the other.

Adam Lindsay Honsinger has had fiction and reviews published in a number of publications, including Exile, The Malahat Review, Other Voices, paperplates, Pottersfield Portfolio, PRISM international and SubTerrain.

The National Magazine Awards Foundation is dedicated to the recognition of excellence in Canadian Magazines through its yearly awards program. This year’s Awards Gala is set to take place on June 4, 2010, at the Carlu in Toronto.

Congratulations, Adam, and good luck!

To order a copy of Descant 145, visit our website at here

To view the full list of categories and nominations, go here

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Posted in Awards, Fiction, General

Announcing the 2010 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem Winner!

Posted on February 20, 2010 by Vera| Leave a comment

Descant is pleased to announce the Winner and Honourary Mentions for the 2010 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem!

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Descant Editor-in-Chief, Karen Mulhallen, presented the $1,000 prize in honour of Newfoundland poet, Leslie Vryenhoek, during a celebratory reception at Toronto’s PageWave Graphics last night.

The Collins Prize commemorates Winston Collins, a writer and enthusiastic teacher of literature at the universities of Cincinnati, Princeton and Toronto. The annual prize perpetuates his remarkable talent for encouraging self-expression through writing. The response to the fourth year of this competition exceeded expectations. Submissions came in from across the country by first time and seasoned poets alike, attesting to the quality and diversity of poetry in Canada.

The judges for this year’s award — Nora Kelly and Eric Wright — were struck by Vryenhoek’s winning poem, “Letitia’s Cold Footsteps,” and praised it for its nuanced exploration of alienation. “‘Letitia’s Cold Footsteps’ takes us into the strangeness of arrival in a new country and makes us shiver. The chill of forty below and the chill of alienation are inextricable: we can see little clouds of frozen breath with each compressed utterance. The linking of the speaker with her nineteenth-century predecessor and spiritual twin is a wonderful device, beautifully imagined and creating a distinctly Canadian poem.”

Also recognized during Friday’s announcement were Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst, currently a resident of Australia, and Toronto’s Myna Wallin. Both received Collins Prize Honourable Mentions and $250 awards.

In “Eating Quince with Musicians,” Hiemstra-van der Horst offers readers an “elegant meditation on metamorphosis, both mental and material”. The judges celebrated her work for its sensual sophistication and suggested that “The poet listens, tastes, and remembers, senses afloat, dipping into the past and then surfacing again, drawn by a perfect but fleeting moment.” Hiemstra-van der Horst is a visual artist and writer. She has recently been anthologized in Approaches to Poetry: the pre-poem moment, edited by Shane Neilson (Frog Hollow Press).

The judges called Wallin’s work “A poignant incantatory poem that draws together the speaker’s worries, weaving a spell around her fears.” In “Death, Wildlife and Taxes,” Wallin allows poverty and illness to “hover like evil spirits who must be placated by spiritual offerings.” Her poetry and prose has appeared in numerous literary journals. Her first book of fiction, Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar, is set for publication in Spring 2010 with Tightrope Books.

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ABOUT THE WINNER – Leslie Vryenhoek is a poet, writer and communications professional based in St. John’s. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines across the country and internationally. In the fall of 2009, Oolichan published her first book, Scrabble Lessons, a short story collection. Leslie has just completed a manuscript of poetry exploring notions of home and belonging, with support from the Canada Council and the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council; “Letitia’s Cold Footsteps” is part of this manuscript.

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Posted in Authors, Awards, Contests, Descant News, General, Industry News, Poetry

You’re Invited: ’10 DESCANT/Winston Collins Prize Announcement & Celebration!

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Drew| 1 Comment

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DESCANT/Winston Collins Prize — Announcement & Celebration
Friday, February 19th, 2010 / 6-8pm
PageWave Graphics
533 College Street, Suite 402, Toronto
(on the corner of College and Euclid, three blocks west of Bathurst)

DESCANT is proud to present the poetry event of the season!

Join us for an evening of celebration dedicated to the public announcement of the Winner and Honourable Mentions for the 2010 DESCANT/Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem.

This free event is open to the general public and we encourage the entire DESCANT community to attend. Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres will be served as the winners of this year’s contest share their striking new works with us.

2010 marks the fourth anniversary of this important prize for Canadian poets. One winner will be awarded $1000, and two honourary mentions will take home $250 each. They will be chosen by this year’s judges, writers Nora Kelly and Eric Wright, from the 100 submissions we received from poets across the country.

This prize was established in memory of Winston Collins, a writer and enthusiastic teacher of literature at the universities of Cincinnati, Princeton and Toronto. The prize perpetuates his remarkable talent for encouraging self-expression through writing.

We look forward to celebrating with you!

For more information about this prize and event, visit:

http://descant.ca/contest.html

Watch for the publication of the winning poems in DESCANT 149 (our Summer 2010 issue)

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Posted in Awards, Contests, Descant News, Events, General, Poetry, Readings

2009-2010 OAC Writers Reserve decisions are in!

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Drew| Leave a comment

Thank you to everyone that submitted an OAC Writers Reserve application to DESCANT.

The deadline for 2009-2010 submissions has now passed and our final decisions are made. All applicants will be notified about the status of their proposals by mail.

The DESCANT editorial team was impressed with the quality of your writing and the scope of your ideas. We look forward to reading more about your exciting projects when we receive applications from each of you again next October!

Best wishes for another year of inspiration and creative production!

From,
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Posted in Awards, Contests, Descant News, General

Short Fiction contest for Emerging Writers

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Sam White| Leave a comment

If you’re not a poet, and you’re feeling left out from the Winston Collins poetry contest, don’t worry — the Writers’ Trust of Canada is accepting submissions for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. This year, the prize is for the fiction category. Entrants must be under 35 years of age, Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and unpublished in book form. One winner will be awarded $5000, and two honourable mentions will be awarded $1000.

The Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers alternates annually between poetry and short fiction entries.  Some previous winners include: Michael Crummey, Stephanie Bolster, Sonnet L’Abbe, Gillian Best, and Jeramy Dodds.

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Posted in Awards, Call For Submissions, Contests, Fiction, Industry News