Rita Wong Wins Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize
Rita Wong in the Columbia Watershed. (Photo by Hiromi Goto / courtesy Rita Wong)
Posted on
The poet, scholar and ECU faculty member says she is honoured for the recognition, which is juried by a panel of fellow poets.
Poet, scholar and ECU faculty member Rita Wong has been awarded the prestigious Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize.
The $60,000 prize is awarded annually to a mid-career Canadian poet whose work demonstrates “mastery of the art.”
“Rita Wong’s immediate and necessary poetry takes the breath away,” writes the jury. “Wong is a poet of total commitment. Her poetry lives on the page, and she sometimes claims the margins as well. We can feel her heart in her words in ways that are both playful and blunt, razor-sharp and lyrically beautiful. Frankly political and decolonial, Wong accompanies her warrior’s poetry with intense meditations on heritage and ecology, often in the same moment. Wong’s body of work is remarkable, transformative, and inspiring."
Poets are recognized for an outstanding body of work and for “anticipated future contributions to Canadian poetry.” Winners are selected by an independent jury and are announced annually at the Writers’ Trust Awards. Past recipients include Joseph Dandurand, Weyman Chan, Stephen Collis and Laisha Rosnau. Laisha was among the three-person jury which selected Rita for the honour.
Rita’s past awards include a 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2011, she was the Canada Reads Poetry champion. Rita also received the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of a half dozen volumes of poetry and numerous journal articles. Rita teaches Critical + Cultural Practice in the Faculty of Culture + Community at ECU.
Rita has written or contributed to numerous volumes of poetry including forage (2007), Current, Climate (2021), beholden (with Fred Wah, 2018), monkeypuzzle (2000), undercurrent (2015) and perpetual (with Cindy Mochizuki, 2015). (Images courtesy Rita Wong)
“It is an incredible honour and a joy to be recognized by fellow poets,” Rita says. “I am deeply moved by what the Writer’s Trust does to support writers. Poetry invites readers into a much larger, ongoing intergenerational conversation, for which I am ever grateful. It orients me towards how our lives depend on one another’s dignity and liberation. My first book of poetry, monkeypuzzle, was dedicated to peace, love and justice, all of which we need as much as ever today. I hope we find the strength and perseverance to walk this path together. “
Rita, whose work as an artist and educator centres ecological justice and decolonization, offers a word of encouragement for her peers, readers and students.
“It is hard but necessary to stay tender yet tenacious in our solidarity with vulnerable people who are part of the lands and waters, who cannot and must not be severed from the watersheds they are part of,” she says. “Poetry is committed to life, which means respecting our interdependent relationships with everyone from the Gitanyow hereditary chiefs protecting their lax’yip from fracked methane gas to the folks running the Gaza Soup Kitchen to the rainforests that make our lives possible, and more.”