Winners of the 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry

Three for a Whirl

Ready for a spin? The results are in! Oh, where to begin… Okay, enough of the rhymes, already. Lucky for you, dear reader, the winning Magpies soar mighty high in the poetry sky. (Somebody stop me!)

Let’s let contest judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar take it from here:

First Place Winner: ‘they say you will teach me more than I will ever teach you’ by Charlene Kwiatkowski

Kudos to the writer of this sweet sonnet: great tone and rhythm, and wonderful unity of voice and focus. Iambic pentametre(ish) is a true poet’s feat and one of my favourites.

Second Place: ‘think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer trees.’ by Maria Ford

I admire ambitious, expansive poems and we get that here with loads of interesting things. [This poem also holds] great diction and imagery.

Editors’ Choice:  ‘Hummingbird Elegy’ by Cara Waterfall

This year’s entries were so enticing that Pulp’s poetry editors (and first judges) Emily Osborne and Daniel Cowper just couldn’t resist picking a charm for themselves: Each short line in this elegy is like a prism’s facet, reflecting the bright tones and soft sounds of tiny birdlife. But the poem also cuts like glass, balancing the fragility and terror of mourning.

Thank you to Renée Sarojini Saklikar, our esteemed judge, for once again lending her time and talent to the Magpies, and to our poetry editors Emily Osborne and Daniel Cowper for selecting the shortlist. The winners will make their appearance in Issue 28, Autumn 2020.  And for those of you feeling inspired to put your own words to paper or pixel, the Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize is open now until June 15.

Renée Sarojini Saklikar recently completed her term as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey, British Columbia. She lives in East Vancouver. Her latest book is a B.C. bestseller: Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018) co-authored with Dr. Mark Winston. Renée’s first book, children of air india, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) won the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for poetry. Renée co-edited The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press/SFU Public Square, 2015,) a City of Vancouver book award finalist. Her chapbook, After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees, (above/ground press, 2016), was a finalist for the 2017 bpNichol award. Renée’s poetry has been made into musical and visual installations, including the opera, air india [redacted].

Renée curates the popular poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU and serves on the boards of Event magazine, The Capilano Review, and the Bob Stewart Archives. She is a director for the board of the Surrey International Writers Conference. Renée belongs to the League of Canadian Poets and The Writer’s Union of Canada (TWUC) and is a member of the TWUC Equity Committee. In 2019 Renée served as Writer in Residence for the Surrey English Teachers Association and was Guest Poet for Art Song Lab. Her creative productions included a new poetry chapbook, a poem-play about Canadian nurses in war time and a dance-poem installation with Vancouver dance artist, Salome Nieto and the adaptation of her bee poems into a musical composition by composer Owen Underhill, performed by Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble.

Renée was called to the BC Bar as a Barrister and Solicitor, served as a director for youth employment programs in the BC public service, and now teaches law and ethics for Simon Fraser University in addition to teaching creative writing at both SFU and Vancouver Community College. She is currently working on an epic-length sci-fi poem, THOT-J-BAP, that appears in journals, anthologies, and chapbooks, and is researching a self-help book about gender, culture, and fashion.