Article content

Billy-Ray Belcourt of Alberta’s Driftpile Cree Nation — the first First Nations Oxford Rhodes scholar — is up for the $65,000 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his anthology, This Wound is a World.

One of seven nominees for the annual prize awarded by the Toronto-based Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the four international and three Canadian finalists are each awarded another $10,000 for their participation in the shortlist readings June 6 in the Ontario capital, with two winners announced the next day.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Driftpile's Billy-Ray Belcourt up for $65K international poetry prize Back to video

Poems from the shortlisted books are also included in an anthology published by House of Anansi Press.

“Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World shows us poetry at its most intimate and politically necessary. Mindful of tangled lineages and the lingering erasures of settler colonialism, Belcourt crafts poems in which ‘history lays itself bare’ — but only as bare as their speaker’s shape-shifting heart,” said a statement from the jury.

“Belcourt pursues original forms with which to chart the constellations of queerness and indigeneity, rebellion and survival, desire and embodied-ness these poems so fearlessly explore.”

Belcourt is currently a PhD student in the department of English and film studies at University of Alberta.

An excerpt of the book can be read online at griffinpoetryprize.com.

fgriwkowsky@postmedia.com

@fisheyefoto