The highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has acted as a tremendous spur to interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English. And each year The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards, and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

This year, editor and prize juror Suzanne Buffam’s selections from the international shortlist include poems from Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen (Giramondo Publishing), Alan Shapiro’s Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press), and Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, and Other Poems (Yale University Press), translated by Fady Joudah. The selections from the Canadian shortlist include poems from David W. McFadden’s What’s the Score (Mansfield Press), Sailing to Babylon by James Pollock (Able Muse Press), and Personals by Ian Williams (Freehand Books).

In choosing the 2013 shortlist, prize jurors Suzanne Buffam, Mark Doty, and Wang Ping considered more than 500 collections published in the previous year. The jury also wrote the citations that introduce the seven poets’ nominated works.

Royalties generated from The 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, which was created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities.

Shortlist to be announced: Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Readings: Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Prizes awarded: Thursday, June 13, 2013

Suzanne Buffam' first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry, was named a Globe and Mail "Top 100" Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the ReLit Award. She won the 1998 CBC Literary Award for Poetry and has twice been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and journals in the United States and Canada, including Books in Canada, Poetry, Jubilat, A Public Space, The Canary, The Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Language Matters, Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets and Breaking the Surface. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Master's program in English at Concordia University, she currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Suzanne Buffam's profile page

Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry. He has also published five volumes of nonfiction prose, among them Dog Years, which was named a New York Times bestseller. He has been awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

Mark Doty's profile page

Wang Ping was born in Shanghai. She left China in 1985 to study in the U.S., earning her Ph.D. from New York University. Her publications include the poetry collections Of Flesh and Spirit and The Magic Whip. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and teaches at Macalester College.

Wang Ping's profile page