Gauntlet by Juliane Okot Bitek

Juliane Okot Bitek has made the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Gauntlet.

• 30 writers make longlist for the 2018CBC Poetry Prize

About Juliane

Juliane Okot Bitek is the author of 100 Daysand Sublime: Lost Words.100 Days was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Lushei Prize for African Poetry. Juliane lives on the unceded, ancestral and traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people, in Vancouver.

Entry in five-ish words

Party in the footnotes.

The poem's source of inspiration

"A journey to reclaim the footnotes as a space for joy, beauty, and free expression."

First lines

this is a poem for Our own self
let's go where neither of us has gone before &let's go see what's what
the right write let's go write the right stuff the write rites the right wrongs write out the right lies of the archive let's rite the forgotten those determined by who of us you disappeared

About the 2018CBCPoetry Prize

The winner of the 2018CBCPoetry Prizewill receive$6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, will have their work published onCBC Booksandwill have the opportunity to attend a writing residency attheBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.