2024 Contest Winners
MRB Poetry Award Contest
Judged by Bola Opaleke
MRB Poetry Prize:
Cassandra Eliodor
Orleans, ON"I find Adam’s rib in my mother’s tongue"
In the beginning, god made sound an opening of the mouth the movements of the throat without the tongue —la langue / Perhaps, before the split, there was never a need for the tongue back when meaning came from the same belly and lied inside a single skull Perhaps only in rupture did we begin ...
an opening of the mouth
the movements of the throat without the tongue
—la langue
/
Perhaps, before the split,
there was never a need for the tongue
back when meaning came from the same belly
and lied inside a single skull
Perhaps only in rupture
did we begin to cry with purpose
Two mouths, writhing for understanding
Severed and bloody,
we made noise
For full poem, check out our summer 2025 issue coming out in July 2025!
Cassandra is a second generation Haitian-Canadian writer, recently graduated from the University of Ottawa. She was the 2023 and 2024 recipient of the Christa Zeller Thomas Excellence in English Literature Prize. Interested in language and reclaiming narratives, she is working towards pursuing a Master’s degree in Translation.
MRB Poetry Prize Honourable Mention :
Kevin Irie
Toronto, ON"The Higher the Boat… (An Alzheimer Elegy)"
There was laughter in the backyard, dry land beneath you. Company was sweet as the salmon on the barbecue. Your fresh caught specialty. You welcomed even the uninvited into that yard too small for your heart. Watched The Great Northern ships that bore your words home: The higher the boat the lower the catch You ...
Company was sweet as the salmon on the barbecue. Your fresh caught specialty.
You welcomed even the uninvited into that yard too small for
your heart. Watched The Great Northern ships that bore your words home:
The higher the boat
the lower the catch
You remembered vessels so heavy with sockeye they seemed to be
sinking. Of being called to the cannery line to help.
From your house, you could see the anchored vessels. The Great Northern One.
The Great Northern Three. You couldn’t see time depleting its stock.
The higher the boat
the lower the catch
For full poem, check out our summer issue coming out in July 2025!
Kevin Irie is a Japanese-Canadian poet from Toronto. He won Grain’s 2024 Short Grain Contest for poetry and was second runner-up in The New Quarterly’s 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. He is in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Press, 2025). His most recent collection is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).
MRB Fiction Contest
Judged by Lauren Carter
MRB Fiction Prize:
Rose Cullis
Toronto, ON"The Charm"
Sophie gives Dee a pair of Tom’s flannel pajamas and the two of them climb into bed. When Sophie turns on her side to sleep, Dee spoons her. She presses her large breasts into Sophie’s back, and Sophie wonders if Dee is really honouring what they’ve agreed to. Sophie isn’t attracted to Dee but she ...
But Dee falls asleep right away. Sophie lies in the dark, feeling uneasy.
She hears her younger son, Sam, waking up and padding down the hall. He opens the door and comes in. Sam is twelve years old—a little chubby and still shorter than Sophie. He stands in front of his mother, gazing down at her with gentle eyes.
“Can I sleep with you?”
It’s still not that uncommon for Sam to sleep in his parents’ bed. Sophie and her husband, Tom, are a little worried about it, but they also understand. It’s hard to sleep alone. After all, they don’t.
And then Sam says, “Who’s that?”
“A friend of mine,” Sophie says, lifting the covers for him. “She’s sleeping over.”
Sam climbs into the bed in front of Sophie and lies on his side and falls back asleep. Now Sophie has Dee on one side and Sam on the other. She lies sandwiched between them in the dark, with her arms around Sam and Dee’s arms around her. Her eyes are open for most of the night, as if she’s on watch duty. As if she has the power to stop what’s already arrived.
Check out the full story in our summer issue, out in July 2025!
Rose Cullis is a queer playwright/writer who celebrates all forms of writing and performance in their work. They’ve had short stories, plays and monologues published in a number of theme-based anthologies, and other writing in This Magazine, Event Magazine, Brick and Vallum. Cullis completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Guelph University. They wrote the text for a new play with music called After/BAAL that was developed in Banff and workshopped and presented at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in December ‘24. See more at rosecullis.com
MRB Fiction Prize Honourable Mention:
Jacksyn Peacock
Windsor, ON"Minor Apocalypses "
I was on shift with Arianna the night the Subway caught fire. It happened a little after nine—or at least that’s when we noticed the smoke curling under our tongues, thick and rotten. We checked the toaster oven, then the bread oven in the back, but nothing around us seemed to be burning. That’s because ...
I’d just turned eighteen. Arianna was nineteen. We were the wrong people to witness this together. In part because we were both a little too young and uncertain to handle it properly: somehow in our scramble to evacuate we’d forgotten all of our belongings and most of the standard protocols, including calling 911. But also because—I thought about this, even right then when everything was melting—we’d always been badly suited to each other’s company. It wasn’t dislike, at least not on my end. I didn’t know what to call it.
Check out the full story in our summer issue, out in July 2025!
Jaksyn Peacock is a creative writing student at the University of Windsor, where her work has appeared in student-edited chapbooks. She can often be found in transit between local cafés. This is her first magazine publication.
MRB CREATIVE NON-FICTION CONTEST
Judged by Jenny Heijun Wills
MRB Creative Non-Fiction Prize Winner:
Siavash Saadlou
Coquitlam, BC"At Home in Avonlea"
On Friday night, Sara and I huddled around the old TV set, waiting to be transported from our dingy basement apartment in Tehran to the sun-dappled fields of Prince Edward Island. The aroma of chicken and steamed rice wafted out from our cramped kitchen as Mom insisted that we finish dinner before 9 o’clock. “I ...
Sara and I didn’t know Avonlea was a fictional name. We talked about the people there as if they were our neighbors, greeting us with their warm smiles. We envied those living in the Avonlea homes—houses bathed in sunlight, with flower boxes adorning the windows and rocking chairs swaying on the porches—everything a stark contrast to where we lived. To reach our home, you had to pass through the main door of a nondescript two-story building in some marooned alley, walk to the left corner of the parking garage, and then descend two flights of stairs. There, you would have found two timeworn wooden doors—one leading to the mice-infested storage room, the other to our home, where the floor was rough, unfinished stone, bare of any ceramic tiles or hardwood.
Our landlord was an old woman who owned the entire building and lived on the second floor with her two sons. She had agreed to rent us the apartment only after learning that my dad had died as a martyr in the Iran-Iraq War—because her youngest son, too, had been killed in the war. Otherwise, the whispers of being called zan-e-bishohar or “a husbandless woman” chased my mom everywhere. On one occasion, a realtor hurled insults at my mom right before my eyes, his voice dripping with disdain. Every Friday night, though, as the familiar theme music of Road to Avonlea filled the room, everything else paled into insignificance for us.
Check out our summer issue for the full story, out in July 2025!
Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose piece, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected as a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays series by Robert Atwan. His work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Southeast Review, among other journals. Saadlou is the winner of the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.
MRB Creative Non-Fiction Prize Honourable Mention:
LJ Weisberg
Victoria, BC"To Carry Across"
In a rectangular birch box, buried amidst formal government papers, vaccination records and first birthday cards, lies a certain paper which catches my eye. Holding my past in my hands like this reminds me of my origins with a sudden clarity. The document is labelled simply “certificate.” Its header states it is a letter from ...
translation:
This is to certify that Lin Jinliang, female, was born on November 4, 1999, and was found to be abandoned at the gateway of Hangzhou No. 7 People's Hospital on November 11, 1999. She was sent to be brought up by our Hangzhou Children's Welfare Institute on November 11, 1999 by Hangzhou Gudang Police Station. Our institute has looked for her parents and relatives by all means, but no trace can be found.
Translate origin: from Latin “translat,” to carry across
As a child, my mother used to tell me stories. She would regale me with books she read as a child, everything from Anne of Green Gables, to adventure fantasy novels. She’d recount tales about her childhood friends she made growing up in the rural, Oakville suburbs. As I lay in bed, sleepy and full of that night’s dinner, I’d beg my mother: “Tell me a story about when you were my age.”
As I grew older, these stories changed and shifted on my journey to young adulthood. Today, there is only one story I have asked her to tell me again, then again. My adoption story. Over the years, details were added when I was ready to hear them. Some hard questions were answered differently the older I became. At its core, it has remained the same. As I’ve grown up and moved cities, moved lives, it is one of the only parts of me that remains unchanged. I remember my beginnings going something like this:
“You were found at the hospital gates, at an entrance that nurses used every day going to work. Your birth parents knew where to leave you so you’d be found. We think they left your birth date on a piece of paper. We know you were left with baby food and a bottle. From there you were taken to an orphanage, where nurses cared for you day and night until you were 10 months old. Then, your father and I flew all the way across the ocean from Canada to meet you in China. We waited through the first day while everyone else from the adoption group received their children, except us. We weren’t told why we hadn’t gotten our baby. Eventually the next day, after hours of waiting, you were finally carried out by an official. I held you for the very first time and I knew with certainty, for better or worse, you would be my daughter forever. And I will always love you, no matter what.”
For full story, check out our summer issue, out in July, 2025!
LJ Weisberg is a nonbinary transmasculine writer living on the lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. They hold a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria, where they received the Lorna Crozier Poetry Award in 2024. Their work has been published in UVIC’s literary journal This Side of West, and featured in Adoption Canada. This is their first publication in a national literary journal.