Writes of Spring

For the 6th year in a row, the Winnipeg Free Press will be publishing poetry by Manitoba writers for National Poetry Month in partnership with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. As always, we’ll be taking a page from the League of Canadian Poets, which means that this year’s theme will be resilience.  

What does it mean to be resilient in Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Metis Nation? What does it mean to be resilient in the face of the second or third wave of COVID-19, with its job losses and mental health struggles? What does it mean to be resilient in the face of climate change, when we keep on breaking records and there’s no such thing as normal weather? 

However you interpret the theme, editors Ariel Gordon and Tamar Rubin are looking forward to reading your poems! 

Eligible writers: Manitoba poets, working in English and French. Writes of Spring is committed to a diversity of voices: emerging, PoC, urban, spoken word, Indigenous, established, rural, Black, LGBTQ+, newcomer, and page poets. 

Details: 

• Submit a maximum of 5 poems, English or French, on the subject of resilience. Each poem should be no more than 25 lines. 
• Submit a short bio (max 40 words). 
• Combine poems and bio into a single document (Word, PDF, RTF). 
• Email document to poetrymonthwfp@gmail.com. (Please include bio in the body of the email as well.) 

The DEADLINE for submissions is Friday, March 26, 2021. 

Twelve poems will be published by the Winnipeg Free Press on Saturday, April 24. Selected poets will receive a $75 honorarium for their work. 

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1-based author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry at the Manitoba Book Awards. Her latest books are Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019) and TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020).  

Tamar Rubin is a Winnipeg physician, writer and mother. She has published her work in both literary and medical journals, including Vallum, Prairie Fire, CV2, The New Quarterly, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Hippocrates Medical Poetry Anthology and others. Her first book of poetry, Tablet Fragments, was published by Signature Editions in 2020.