2026 Senior Online Qualifiers Judges

Francine Cunningham is an award-winning writer, artist, and educator who spends her summer days writing on the prairies and her winter months teaching in the north. Francine is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta but grew up in Calgary, Edmonton, and 100 Mile House, BC. Francine is also Métis, and has settler family roots stretching from as far away as Ireland and Belgium. She currently resides in Alberta but previously spent over a decade calling Vancouver her home.

Her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for The BC and Yukon Book Prize, The Indigenous Voices Award, and The Vancouver Book Award. Her debut book of short stories God Isn’t Here Today (Invisible Publishing), a book of speculative fiction and horror, was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award, and won the 2023 ReLit award for short fiction. Her first children’s book What If Bedtime Didn’t Exist? (Annick Press) was chosen for the 2024 TD Summer Reads Program. Francine also writes for television with credits including the teen reality show THAT’S AWSM! among others, and was a recipient of a Telus StoryHive grant. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have also appeared in Best Canadian Short Stories, Best Canadian Non-Fiction, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for prose shortlist, and on the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist, among others. Francine was the 2023/2024 Writer in Residence at the University of Calgary. 

You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca

Born in Beauce, Dostie is a filmmaker, poet, and playwright. His short films Mutants (2016), Je finirai en prison (2019), and BOA (2025) have been acclaimed at festivals around the world, including Locarno, Sundance, and Clermont-Ferrand. He has won several awards, including at the Iris du cinéma québécois, the Canadian Academy's Écrans gala, and the Toronto Film Festival.  As an author, he has published Shenley (2014), Trois saisons aux courses (2020) and Que ceux qui m'aiment me sauvent (2022), poetic works that have led him to perform throughout the French-speaking world. His first play, Kiki et la colère, played to sold-out crowds at the Centre du Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui in 2026 and was a hit with critics. Dostie is currently working on his first feature film at COOP Vidéo in Montreal.

Carol-Ann Hoyte writes poetry for young people. Some of her favourite ways of enjoying poetry are reading novels written in free verse, sharing riddle poems, and teaching kids how to write poems for two voices. Carol-Ann has featured the work of poets from around the world in two self-published collections: the award-winning And the Crowd Goes Wild!: A Global Gathering of Sports Poems and Dear Tomato: An International Crop of Food and Agriculture Poems. Scottish poets Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay, both whom she has had the opportunity to meet, are among her greatest poetic inspirations. One day, Carol-Ann hopes to realize her dream of publishing an international poetry magazine for children. From 2007 to 2022, she worked as a librarian at Selwyn House School. As of June 2022, Carol-Ann has served as the events and program manager for The Canadian Children's Book Centre. Beyond poetry, Carol-Ann is an avid crafter and mother to a delightful son who is quickly surpassing her in height. 

Canadian poet Doyali Islam is the author of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted heft (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), a book that was also honoured by the Province of Ontario as a finalist for the 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and by the League of Canadian Poets as a finalist for the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. 

Doyali has participated in CBC Books' Why I Write video-interview series, during which she said, “My advice would be to read and write poetry not just from mind intelligence, but from body intelligence. You will know that your language is working when you read or recite it back to yourself and you feel it working on you viscerally and emotionally. So render your technique in a rigorous way – but inform it with your heart, your spirit, and empathetic imagination.”

Doyali has discussed the value of silence on CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition; language, form, beauty, and empathy with Anne Michaels in CV2; and the relationship between poetry and the body on CBC Radio's The Next Chapter. Doyali has also been interviewed about heft through Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast.

Speaking about her poetics in an Adroit Journal conversation with Forrest Gander, Doyali said, “I guess I would consider the necessity to write about longing, pain, and despair a poetics of survival. I want to survive. I want you to survive. I want my readers-listeners to survive. I want certain kinds of language to survive. I want certain versions of history to survive. I want questions to survive.”

Of Bangladeshi and Arab ancestry, Doyali lives in Canada on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.

Born in Montreal to Haitian parents, Lorrie Jean-Louis earned a bachelor's degree in History, Culture, and Society, followed by a master's degree in literature on the Black body and intersubjectivity. She then pursued studies in library science. She has accumulated diverse professional experience in intercultural mediation, teaching, facilitation, reading, and publishing. In June 2020, she published her first collection, La femme cent couleurs. For this collection, she won Le prix des libraires 2021, le prix de la relève à Montréal, and the Primary Colours Award. She has been a member of the editorial board of Liberté magazine for over five years. She recently made a foray into theatre with the play L'amour ou rien, presented at Espace GO, “adapting” bell hooks' All About Love for the stage. Her influences range from Toni Morrison to Saramago, Stefán Zweig, and Nancy Huston.

Sophie Jeukens has published poems in the magazines Exit, Jet d’encre, and Le Sabord, as well as a mini-collection entitled Kérosène, published by Éditions Fond’tonne. She also created La gueule à la beauté, a poetry show set against a backdrop of vocal soundscapes. She is the author of Couchés en étoile dans la combustion lente des jours, published by Éditions de Ta mère in spring 2022. In her spare time, she is the artistic director of the Maison des arts de la parole, an organization dedicated to storytelling and performance poetry in Sherbrooke.

She never drinks the last sip of coffee.

Jacob is a Governor-General’s-Award-winning poet from Toronto. His third full-length collection Is This Scary?—which engages mental and chronic, physical illness—was published in spring 2021 with ECW Press. The book was noted as being "witty and affecting" by the Toronto Star. He specializes in poetry workshops on the topics of grief and disability. Jacob has been facilitating workshops and giving talks on poetry for high school students for over a decade, including being the former poet in residence at Madonna Catholic Secondary School, in Toronto, through Descant’s Writers in the Schools program. He has also facilitated writing workshops with Indigenous communities in Western Ontario and the Yukon. 

He is most interested in writing out of personal experience, and particularly about being a psychiatric consumer-survivor, in the tradition of the confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. He is, additionally, interested in writing from a Disability Studies or ‘Crip’ perspective, and often incorporates humour in his poems—inspired by the wit of Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy, and the New York School poets, such as Frank O’Hara. 

Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of 4 full-length books of poetry and 19 chapbooks. An assortment of his lyric essays, interviews with neighbours, and personal accounts from others make up the collection Gathered Together in the Stanley Park Manor: a Collective History, out with Anvil Press in the fall of 2026. He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is one of the poetry ambassadors for Vancouver’s 2025-2027 Poet Laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner. He is one of the Poetry Mentors at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.