Marina Nemat Award Finalists Announced

Bradley Alvarez is a communications professional, poet, and writer living in Richmond, British Columbia. He holds a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Simon Fraser University (SFU) as well as a post-baccalaureate diploma in Communications (SFU). In 2022, Bradley won first prize in the University of Toronto’s Janice Colbert poetry award.  He loves long road trips, trudging up mountains, and spending time with his family.

Storylines: Alvarez’ final project, Storylines, is a collection of poems rooted in the experiences that shape us. They are an exploration of family, identity and the landscapes that rise in our memories. 

Kathe Gray is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University in Toronto. She holds a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies, where she was the 2021 recipient of the Penguin Random House of Canada Student Fiction award. Her creative writing has appeared in Carousel, Great Lakes Review, Room, and Versal, and on stage at the Toronto Fringe Festival. She and her family live on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit in Guelph, Ontario.

Gray’s final project, Car Radio At Night Nearly Home tunes into the quiet frequencies of everyday life—absence, memory, and tenderness—flickering between voices, moods, and landscapes. This collection hums with grit, longing, and the uncanny shimmer of the ordinary.

Kerri Huffman is a Toronto-based poet, whose work has appeared in Acta Victoriana, Contemporary Verse 2, Taddle Creek Magazine, The Antigonish Review and The Fiddlehead among others. She has received the Hart House Review Poetry Prize and was twice shortlisted for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Juniper, her first collection of poetry, is being published in Spring 2025 by Frontenac House.

Juniper: Through diary-like reflections, Juniper charts the final months of a transformational, intimate and yet corrosive relationship. A meditation on memory, addiction and longing, the haunting poems in Juniper detail the seemingly insignificant moments between friends that evoke the true meaning of their entanglement.

Jane Macdonald (she/her) lives on the north shore of Lake Ontario where she is currently at work on an oral history of its Commercial Fishery. A White settler, Jane completed her Certificate in Creative Writing with the School of Continuing Studies at University of Toronto, and is a recipient of the Janice Colbert Poetry Award.

Thorn Hedge: Macdonald lives and writes in a rural community on the shores of Lake Ontario, home to the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabek, Wendat, and United Empire Loyalists. And so the spine of her collection, titled Thorn Hedge, runs through snow and water and resounds with grief in poems that linger on the animate and built worlds of small town Ontario, on the hands and lives that produced them and in the remembered understandings of childhood on the Prairies.

Diane Massam writes about aging, anxiety, and the entanglement of nature and mind. With recent/upcoming publications in The New Quarterly, Queens Quarterly, Grain, and Prairie Fire, she won the Federation of BC Writers poetry contest (2021) and the Arc Award of Awesomeness (September 2024). She is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto, where in 2023 she completed a certificate in creative writing at the School of Continuing Studies. With roots in BC, Ontario, and Québec, she now lives in her hometown, Victoria. (IG: @massampoetry)

Ground Cover: Ground Cover explores existential anxiety and the entanglement of nature and mind, through prisms of aging and memory. Firmly rooted in Canadian landscapes, the poems speak of the longing for continuity of ourselves, humanity, and the natural world, in the face of the complexity and strangeness of life.

Maude Abouche, writing as Madi Haab, is a queer and neurodivergent writer of Moroccan descent from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She has lived and studied in Japan, and draws inspiration from her mixed cultural heritage and identities to explore the liminal and interstitial. Her work has received honourable mentions from the 2023 Penguin Random House Student Award for Fiction and 2024 Janice Colbert Poetry Award, and has appeared in Augur Magazine, Haven Speculative, and more. She is currently seeking representation for her first novel, WHERE SPIDER LILIES BLOOM, a historical fantasy with a strong romantic arc set in feudal Japan.

Where Spider Lilies Bloom: After a nasty breakup leaves her stranded in the Japanese countryside, Montrealer-turned-Tokyoite Lily has an ill-advised hookup with a mysterious stranger named Tadao in an abandoned temple. Unable to put him out of her mind, she returns to the temple to look for him, but slips into a liminal realm during her search and ends up in feudal Japan. There she crosses his path again, defying time itself. Faced with betrayal, revenge, and the very real ghosts of the samurai family they’re both bound to protect, Lily and Tadao try to make sense of their fateful bond, while their choices not only affect their present, but ripple across centuries.

Marica Cassis is a historical archaeologist who teaches ancient and medieval history at the University of Calgary and who digs up medieval peasants in rural Türkiye. She has been in love with history and books since she discovered time travel novels when she was a child. She lives in Calgary with her husband, son, three cats, and Oscar the dog.

Enki’s Amulet: Nick, a 13-year old from Toronto, is sent to spend the summer with his grandmother in Newfoundland where he uncovers a mysterious amulet which moves him back through time and space to ancient Mesopotamia. There he encounters more than he bargained for: evil demons (some with wings and claws), a dark plot to control time, and a buried family secret. Can he and his new friend Bel-Inaan, a smart-mouthed scribal student, depend on themselves and each other to save the world? As long as there is baklava and cheese pies, anything is possible.
 

Sharon Dawn Selby teaches English Literature and Professional Communications at Fanshawe College (London, ON), which means she gets to roam the realms of other people's stories when she isn't writing her own. She has published several academic book reviews and a monograph, Memory and Identity in Canadian Fiction. Her short story, “Mine Own,” appeared in Mythaxis in December 2020.

Skye: It's Skye’s seventeenth birthday. Her parents are missing, and everyone seems to be in a terrible hurry to declare her an orphan. When a mysterious letter arrives, filled with hints of a family history that she knows nothing about, all the carefully constructed lies that held her life together begin to fall apart. With the help of her two best friends, Skye is determined to find the truth about what happened to her parents. Their quest will take them beyond this world to a place where stories shape reality and the creatures of nightmares are lying in wait.