MAY 6, 2022
Turnstone Press is delighted to congratulate Sarah Ens and Joanne Epp for their recent nominations for the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie at this year's Manitoba Book Awards.
Sarah's acclaimed The World is Mostly Sky was released in 2020 and gathered a nomination in 2021 for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award and won the Word Guild Award - General Market Non-Fiction - Specialty Book. Joanne's gorgeous Cattail Skyline was released in 2021 and is the follow up to her debut work, Eigenheim which gained Joanne a nomination for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. It is an honour to be nominated alongside work from Laurent Poliquin, Tamar Rubin and Joel Robert Ferguson.
The winners of the Manitoba Book awards will be announced on June 9th, 2022. The full list for nominees for this year's awards can be found here.
More about The World is Mostly Sky and Cattail Skyline
In this shining debut, identity and community converge in poems for a modern generation. Beginning with the open prairie skies of her youth, Sarah Ens maps an emergence into millennial womanhood, questioning feminine expectations and examining heartache and disembodiment during an age of personal and planetary upheaval. The World is Mostly Sky looks backwards and inwards to find respite in stars, warm earth, and deep waters while rejoicing in the sacred bonds of sisterhood that offer the courage to meet our uncertain horizon.
Sarah Ens is a writer and editor based in Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, MB). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, and SAD Mag. She recently released her second collection of poetry, Flyway.
In her second poetry collection, Joanne Epp ventures from open prairie roads into little creek beds, down onto the warm earth of strawberry patches and far afield to the busy markets of Cambodia to examine the intimate ways we come to know and experience place. With vivid detail and a sense of quiet reverence, Cattail Skyline captures a myriad of landscapes where every change of season and slant of light reveals something previously unnoticed, and where even the most well- trodden paths hold the potential for new discovery.
Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Joanne Epp has published poetry in literary journals including The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, and CV2. Married with two sons, she spent several years in Ontario and now makes her home in Winnipeg.