2026 Senior National Finals Hosts & Judges

Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand lives and works in Quebec City. She is pursuing her doctoral studies in literature and performing and screen arts at Laval University. Her research focuses on the concept of frivolity as a sensitive and humorous methodological approach through animated cinema. Belzil-Normand has completed creative residencies and participated in group exhibitions at several artist-run centres in Quebec. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Arprim, Atelier Presse-Papier, La Bande Vidéo, Caravansérail, Galerie R3, and L'Oeil de Poisson. She has screened her animated films at numerous local and international festivals. After Sanités (Moult Éditions, 2020), PUSSY GHOST (Écrits des Forges, 2021), and Vamp (Éditions du passage, 2024), feu flou bouche is her fourth collection of poetry.

Canadian poet and physician Jean Désy (1954–) is a prolific author who oscillates between two worlds: medicine and poetry, writing and teaching, Indigeneity and urban life. Far from being unsettled by this, he draws a balance that can only be found in movement. A member of the Union des écrivaines et des écrivains québécois (Quebec Writers' Union), he publishes poetry, travelogues, short stories, novels, and essays. His writing offers a sense of calm that comes with a condition: that of bringing meaning to our lives, because his work is always about humanism.

Sue Goyette lives in K'jipuktuk (Halifax) and has published several books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Future Howl (Gaspereau Press, 2025). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017), and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, and German, and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spray painted on a sidewalk and tattooed. Her work has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and has won several awards including the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award, the ReLit Award, the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award, a National Magazine Award, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, the Earle Birney Award, the CBC Literary Award for Poetry, as well as the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection Ocean. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University. 

Mimi Haddam is a writer of French-Algerian descent who lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has published Attendez de m’enterrer pour chanter (Noroît, Coll. Adelphe, 2023), Il existe un palais de teintes et d'hyperboles (Noroit, Coll. Omri, 2018) and Petite brindille de catastrophes (Éditions de la Tournure, 2017, expanded edition 2019). Her works have been exhibited at the Galerie de l’UQAM, the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen, the Maison des artistes visuels francophones, the Espace Transmission, the Galerie AVE, and the Ateliers Belleville.

Drawing on the philosophies of living beings and feminist studies, Mimi Haddam is interested in tactile, touched, and touching thoughts, in affective reflections devalued in favour of the norms upheld by dominant institutions of power, in somatic imaginaries, and in ambiguous identities. Her projects, in search of sensitive movements, invest in uncertain spaces without rigid forms.

Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer living in Montréal. Born in Western Canada and with roots in Guyana, Kellough's work emerges at the intersection of engaged sociality and formal inquiry, and has been recognized by the Manitoba Book Awards, the Quebec Writers Federation, and the League of Canadian Poets. He is the author of Accordéon, a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award; Dominoes at the Crossroads, a collection of linked short stories; and two poetry collections. Exploring migration and the suspension of arrival, Kellough's sound work has toured international and includes two albums, Vox:Versus and Creole Continuum. His second book of poetry, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet, was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Treaty 1, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis. She graduated from the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio in 2007. She released her first book, page as bone ~ ink as blood, in 2015 and was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, released in 2022, merges poetry and lyrical memoir to take us on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on her Métis family. 

Jónína currently lives in seniors housing in New Westminster, BC, the unceded territory of the Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples. A chronic pain sufferer, she has walked with her husband as he has faced life-threatening health issues. Living in subsidized senior housing she has also witnessed, firsthand, the challenges of others as they age and live with health issues while on a low income. This journey is documented in her fourth book. Save Your Prayers – Send Money, which will be released in April 2026 with Talonbooks.