We’re beyond thrilled to announce the next in CV2’s 50th Anniversary Workshop Series: a free, two-part poetry workshop with Selina Boan!

In 2025 CV2 is offering five free, generative poetry workshops for emerging poets, each hosted by CV2 poetry editors past and present.

With a capacity of 10 people per workshop, we’re excited to offer 50 emerging writers the chance to work closely with our editors and their fellow workshop attendees to hone their craft, and to build meaningful connections within the literary community.

The second of these five workshops will be hosted by the wonderful, award-winning author and CV2 poetry editor, Selina Boan!

Selina’s two-part workshop will take place Saturday, May 17, & Sunday, May 18, over Zoom. As space is very limited, we require interested participants to apply using this application form. Applications are open now and are due by May 9, 2025, at 5:00pm Central Time.

Priority for this workshop will be given to applicants who identify as one or more of the following: an Indigenous writer; a writer living in Manitoba; a writer with no post-secondary education credentials; a writer with no post-graduate education in writing (such as an MA or MFA degree).

There is no registration fee for this workshop intensive. We ask that all successful applicants commit to attending the entirety of both workshops; priority will be given to those who are able to attend both of the two workshops.

Successful applicants will be contacted via email by Monday, May 12, 2025

Follow  this link to apply, and stay tuned for the announcements of the three further workshops we’ll be offering this year!

Selina Boan is a white settler-nehiyaw (Cree) writer and educator living on the traditional, unceded territories of thexʷməθkʷəy̓əm, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and sḵwx̱wú7mesh peoples. Her debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours won the 2022 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2022 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. Her work has been published widely, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2020. She is a poetry editor for CV2.

Congratulations to the winners of our two 2025 Mini Contests! Justine Berezintsev won our first contest with her poem “Faultline,” which used the words “crepuscular,” “mnemonic,” and “coifs,” and Ross McKie took the prize for our second contest, using “garrulous,” “trellis,” and “cauterize” in his poem “On Speaking for the Picture of my Aunt Wearing Boxing Gloves Next to a Tree That No Longer Stands.”

Thanks to everyone who played our mini contests! We had so much fun choosing words from 2-Day Contests past. (We went way back to the mid-aughts this time!) We hope you enjoyed getting creative with them. Don’t forget to register by April 17th for the full 2-Day Poem Contest, taking place from Friday, April 25th to Sunday, April 27th!

We’re thrilled to announce that the first workshop of our 50th Anniversary Workshop Series will be hosted by the brilliant, award-winning author and CV2 poetry editor, John Elizabeth Stintzi!

JES’s two-part workshop will take place March 22 & 29 at 1:00pm – 4:30pm Central Time, over Zoom. As space is very limited, we require interested participants to apply using our application form. Applications are open now and are due by March 7, 2025, at 5:00pm Central Time.

Priority for this workshop will be given to applicants who identify as one or more of the following: a trans writer; a writer living in Manitoba; a writer with no post-secondary education credentials; a writer with no post-graduate education in writing (such as an MA or MFA degree).

There is no registration fee for this workshop intensive. We ask that all successful applicants commit to attending the entirety of both workshops; priority will be given to those who are able to attend both of the two Saturday workshops.

Successful applicants will be contacted via email by Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Follow this link to apply, and stay tuned for the announcements of the four additional workshops we’ll be offering this year!

We couldn’t be happier to announce the winners of this year’s Foster Poetry Prize, as selected by judge Hannah Green!

Huge congratulations go to Andrea Scott, whose poem “Scar Tissue” was awarded first place and the grand prize of $1000, and to Van Osborne Zimrose, Jade Palmer, and Shelby Satterthwaite, whose poems “reasons to believe in reincarnation,” “Dining Room Tabletop Before the Sunday Clean,” and “Kitty Kitty Womp” were awarded second and third place, and honourable mention, respectively, and each of whom will receive a cash prize.

We know you’re tantalized by these incredible titles, so don’t worry – you won’t have to wait too long to read these winning poems! All four of the winning poems will appear in our Spring 2025 issue.

A huge thank you to Hannah for being our judge, and to everyone who submitted to the contest – we hope you’ll submit again to this year’s contest, which opens in June.

Registration for the 2025 CV2 2-Day Poem Contest is now open!

This annual contest challenges you to write an original poem in 48 hours — with only one catch. The final poem must include ten words that we provide. These words are released at midnight CDT on Friday, April 25th, 2025 (when Friday becomes Saturday), leaving you 48 hours to use each of them at least once in an original poetry composition.

Follow this link to sign up for the contest and start preparing for 48 hours of fun! We’ve already started working on an extra-dastardly list of words, and because it’s our 50th Anniversary year, we have a few special surprises in store for this year’s contest. Stay tuned!

2 Days. 10 words. 1 poem. Get into it!

CV2 is looking for a dedicated, arts-minded individual living in Winnipeg to join our small and mighty team as Managing Editor!

Salary: $20/hour for 10 hours/week. Part-time/flexible hours.

The Managing Editor works in collaboration with the staff on managing the day-to-day tasks of running the magazine, while also contributing to the broader creative and structural goals of the organization through collaborative decision-making practices.

 

• Managing CV2 website, social media, and newsletter

• Soliciting and editing reviews of recent poetry collections

• Assisting with CV2 launches, workshops, and events

• Managing payment for contributors, and other invoices

• Managing email inquiries from contributors, subscribers, and readers

• Communicating with bookkeepers and accountant on financial matters

 

Those interested can find the full job posting, and details on how to apply, here.

Applications due: September 18th

Get ready to walk, run, roll, or stroll your way to 5k, 10k, or a marathon in our Poetry in Motion Fundraiser, 2024 edition. 👟

In this virtual event, you set the pace; start small with a short walk, or champion an entire marathon in one day. 

How you move is up to you!

 

Join us August 5 – 12th. It’s as easy as:

1. Sign up on Race Roster
2. Pick your Race Length
3. Get ready to get creative

Once registered, stay tuned to our Instagram and your email throughout the week where we’ll be sharing prompts that will earn you extra chances to win a special prizes.

Click here to sign up.

#CV2PoetryinMotion

Submissions are now closed. Thanks everyone who submitted!

🥳🎂🎈THE BIRTHDAY ISSUE 🎈🎂🥳

In 2025 CV2 Magazine will turn 50 (!!) years old, and we’ll be celebrating with a whole year of special events and issues. We’re kicking things off with the Birthday Issue (coming out in January 2025), and we want your poems!

Do you have lingering thoughts about the MTV show My Super Sweet Sixteen? Do you feel like the person who chose the birthstones for each month was probably born in April (whose stone is DIAMONDS)? Do you find it mildly offensive that Wikipedia refers to astrology as a pseudoscience? We want your poems about it!

We want to know if you were born in the Year of the Dragon or the Ox, the Rooster or the Dog. We want poems that explore aging, milestones, parties, presents. Astrology, celebrations, birth order, cake. About giving or witnessing birth. About loving or hating being the centre of attention.

Find out what the Hubble telescope saw the day you were born and turn it into a poem. Revisit the time you told someone it was your birthday, but it wasn’t. Tell us about a time you felt reborn.

Sing us a song. Cry if you want to. Make it happy or sad, funny or bittersweet. Blow out your candles and, just this once, tell us what you wished for.

☀️ We’re thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s CV2 2-Day Poem Contest, as selected by our judge (and last year’s winner) Alexander Hollenberg; our editors; our contest captain Yelani Peiris’s mom; and you! ☀️

These poets crafted some stunning poems over the course of 48 hours, using a dastardly ten-word list, and you’ll get to read all of them in our fall 2024 issue!

Read on to hear what judge Alexander Hollenberg had to say about the first, second, and third place winners, and be sure to join us next spring for the 2024 2-Day Poem Contest! ☀️

First Place: “After We Marry and Head West” by Hollie Adams

Second Place: “The Legacy Dam” by Jenna Butler

Third Place: “This Counterfeit Year” by Medrie Purdham

Editor’s Choice: “Pickle Jar Love Poem” by Sarah Wishloff

Editor’s Mom’s Choice: “Last Father’s Day” by Carmen Wall

People’s Choice: “Logical Reasoning” by Jade Y. Liu

 

“After We Marry And Head West”

“The pace of this poem is striking. It gallops. And then it lassos us. The concision of its lines—each like a hard, powerful stride in a hard, powerful life—demonstrates a remarkable, sophisticated attention to form and function. Brilliantly, the poet has crafted a Western that is both comfortable in its own pin-prick flowered clothes but also adds something new to the genre without feeling pressure to wholly subvert it. Every word, every phrase here is deliberate and sings with the possibilities of meaning: “watch me /pioneer this excuse for a broom / across the floor,” or “axes and rifles that un-lady / my arms.” This language does what poetry at its best is supposed to do: it makes the world a bit unfamiliar, makes us look again, makes us grin at the life- affirming possibilities of art. Every line of this poem makes me want to keep reading, and when I get to the end—the gut-punch, just-leave-the-bottle-end—all I want to do is read it again.”

 

“the legacy dam”

“This poem is three things at once: an intricate, studied portrait of an ecosystem; a despairing testimony to human arrogance; and, an inspiring exemplar of human craft. Read this poem out loud. You’ll think you’re hearing magic in the way its sounds echo, reverberate, repeat, but I promise you it’s not magic. It’s a poet who knows their medium well and who knows all the things language can do: “the rich riverine broth / spadderdock’s bright lanterns / held aloft across the bog.” Lines like these make me want to pack up, tramp out, and sit on the banks of a river, just to listen. Lines like these possess the quality of quiet, thoughtful attention that we might look for in all our poetry.”

 

“This Counterfeit Year”

“In a year that’s brought us the plagiarism-machines of AI, this poem laments the snowballing losses of authenticity in even the most private spaces. The speaker implores her child not to speak in memes, she only “pretends” to be a wife, and as she remembers an incident from her past, she reminds herself, “It must have happened,” which suggests maybe it didn’t. The shrewd complexity of this poem is that it doesn’t simply find solace in the real; rather, it questions the slow creep of the counterfeit into all aspects of the speaker’s life—even those that feel the most real, concrete. For me, whatever solace there is exists in the poet’s careful, creative patterning of language and line: “If there’s a soundtrack to this life, please let it be done / on instruments people breathe into.” I haven’t heard a more eloquent plea for the humanity of art in a long time.”

– Alexander Hollenberg, Contest Judge