Encouraging the best debut LGBTQ2S+ writers in Canada

“Perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of Misha Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is its extraordinary scope. Moving between contemporary life and a speculative family past, Solomon writes into the gaps of lineage, testing the space between wish-fulfillment, family lore, and what history can never quite confirm. Across the collection, personal narratives accumulate into something remarkably cohesive and intimate. Solomon’s command of poetry is assured and playful: forms are borrowed and reshaped, lines and rhythms stretch across the page, while a distinctly conversational voice keeps even the most formally ambitious poems alive and immediate. The narrator is funny. Slap-your-knee funny. NSFW funny. This is a queer delight.”—2026 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers Jury (francesca ekwuyasi, Kama La Mackerel, Michael V. Smith)