OCAD University congratulates creative writing instructor and poet Canisia Lubrin who has won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection of poems, The Dyzgraphxst published by McClelland & Stewart. She receives C$65,000 in prize money as the Canadian winner.
The Griffin Poetry Prize was founded in 2000 to encourage and celebrate excellence in poetry. The prize is for first edition books of poetry written in, or translated into, English and submitted from anywhere in the world. Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was the International winner of the 2021 prize.
According to the Jury Citation for the Griffin Poetry Prize: “The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin’s spectacular feat of architecture called a poem. Built with ‘I’—a single mark on the page, a voice, a blade, ‘a life-force soaring back’—and assembled over seven acts addressing language, grammar, sentence, line, stage, and world, the poet forms, invents, surprises, and sharpens life. Generous, generating, and an abundance of rigour. A wide and widening ocean of feeling are the blueprints of this book. It is shaped to be ‘the shape of the shape / of the shape of a thing that light curves over time / length to width to depth and all of us its information.’”
Lubrin’s poetry collection has received numerous accolades, including the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. The collection was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Reader’s Awards, and longlisted for Raymond Souster Award and Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
In 2021, Lubrin was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize. Born and raised in Saint Lucia, she completed a BA in creative writing at York University holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction debut, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.