Join Sylvia Legris, recipient of the 2024/2025 Prairie Grindstone Prize, and special guest Sherri Benning for a celebratory reading and discussion of Sylvia’s poetry. followed by a Q&A (time permitting) and signing.
This event will be held in person in the Travel Alcove.
Sylvia Legris’s most recent poetry collection is The Principle of Rapid Peering, published in 2024 by New Directions in the US, in the UK by Corsair Books and distributed in Canada. Her collection Garden Physic (Granta Books, 2022; New Directions, 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK and was named a Best Poetry Book of the Year by both The London Times and CBC Radio. Garden Physic was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for a poetry collection about nature or the environment. Her other collections include The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatic Antiphonal, and Nerve Squall, which was winner of both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, she lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Sheri Benning’s fourth poetry collection, Field Requiem, was published in 2021 with Carcanet Press. Field Requiem was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Brick, and Poetry Review. Her previous collections of poetry include The Season’s Vagrant Light: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press), Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press). Benning is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Prairie Grindstone Prize is a $50,000 prize awarded yearly to a prairie writer, given in recognition of a body of work. Conceived, developed and funded by an anonymous donor committee, all of whom love Canadian literature and have a fondness for the talent of prairie writers, this annual prize was awarded in 2023 to an Alberta writer, in 2024 to a Saskatchewan writer, and will alternate between the two prairie provinces in the years ahead. The Prairie Grindstone Prize recognizes active writers with the hope that a year of freedom from financial constraints will be beneficial to their career.
