The 2018
Metatron Prize
for Rising Authors
With Guest Judges:
CAConrad & Anne Boyer
The Winners
1st place:
Kaitlyn Purcell
?bédayine
Prize: $500, publishing contract, Metatron book bundle
2nd place:
Matthew Girolami
Fire Regime
Prize: $200, Metatron book bundle
3rd place:
Kyla Jamieson
Body Count
Prize: Metatron book bundle
ʔbédayine by Kaitlyn Purcell is this year's winner of the Metatron Prize! Kaitlyn Purcell will be awarded $500, a book contract with Metatron Press, book blurbs from our guest judges CAConrad and Anne Boyer and will receive publication later this year!
Kaitlyn Purcell is a member of Smith’s Landing First Nation, and the Writing Revolution in Place creative research collective. She is a PhD student at the University of Calgary studying Indigenous literatures, creative writing, and community-based learning. Her work is inspired by her experiences as a troubled adolescent in Edmonton, detached from her Dene roots. She has won numerous awards for her creative work, such as the Stephen Kapalka Memorial Prize in Creative Writing (2015) and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize (2017).
In her own words: "ʔbédayine is about sexual sovereignty. It’s about Indigenous ways of knowing, the importance of community, and the effects of intergenerational trauma."
"There were several years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four where I was trying so hard to become normal. I just wanted to forget my past traumas. In this undoing, I lost a sense of compassion for myself and others who were dealing with similar struggles. My sister Lorrie battled with her mental health and addictions for so many years until 2014 when she passed away from an overdose. After her death, I spent some time thinking about her life and mine. I realized that I cannot carry shame for my past anymore if I want to survive, and if I want to be better able to help others survive their own traumas. Since then, I have started to open myself up again, learning how to make peace with my past and my memories. I wouldn’t have been able to write this without the support of my family, and the mentors and friends that I’ve made along the way."
We are sooooooo happy to welcome Kaitlyn Purcell to the Metatron fam and feel so honoured to have the opportunity to publish ?bédayine, her debut book, later this year.
Our second and third place winners this year are Matthew Girolami and Kyla Jamieson.
The Metatron Prize was founded in 2015 and has contributed to three fantastic debut collections: number one earth by jasper avery, Soft Focus by Sarah Jean Grimm and Pony Castle by Sofia Banzhaf.
The Finalists
The Shortlist
Aeon Ginsberg
Greyhound
Bella Bravo
Public Empathy
Brianna Johnson
Fire Sale
Candice Wuehle
DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Cassidy Marsh
Raptio
Dalton Day
Our Immoveable Error
Dessa Bayrock
even the automobile
wrecks gleam with some new
hallucinatory splendour
Gion Davis
Too Much
Gloria Muñoz
Dawn's Early
Hannah Ciordas
BodyHouse
Isabel Balee
the spectacle
Ivanna Baranova
confirmation bias
Jackie Mlotek
Greetings from Uncanny Valley
Jakob Maier
Happy Hour in the
Decline of Civilization
Jesse Rice Evans
ACNE
Kaitlyn Purcell
ʔbédayine
Kodi Saylor
Many Arms Emanating
From A Central Point
Kyla Jamieson
Body Count
Lena Suksi
What Are You?
Marie Conlan
[neurotic love baby]
Matthew Girolami
Fire Regime
Meagan Masterman
What Dies Inside
Meghann Boltz
True Romance
Rawaan Alkhatib
Empty Quarter
Sydney S. Kim
Dream Snake
Viola Chen
No Problematics
Zaynab Bourezza
Hello? Broke bitch speaking.
The Judges
CAConrad
CAConrad is the author of 9 books of poetry and essays. Their latest, While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017), won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry earlier this year. A recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Literature, they have also received The Believer Magazine Book Award and The Gil Ott Book Award. They conduct workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics and is currently working on a (Soma)tic poetry ritual titled, "Resurrect Extinct Vibration," which investigates the effects that vibrational absence of recently extinct species has on the body of the poet and the poems. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.
Anne Boyer
Anne Boyer is an American poet and essayist, and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and a 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry. Boyer is the author of A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, the 2016 CLMP Firecracker award-winning Garments Against Women, My Common Heart, and The Romance of Happy Workers. In 2014, Boyer was diagnosed with highly-aggressive triple negative breast cancer which led to her work on the politics of care in the age of precarity. Boyer is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute where she teaches writing, literature, and theory in the School of the Liberal Arts.
First readers:
A. Light Zachary
Ariana Molly
Ashley Obscura
Marcela Huerta
Pamela Lisa
Sennah Yee
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Sophie Marisol