2026 Purdy Poetry Prize goes to Tom Wayman: Jean Baird

 

April 22, 2026 TOM WAYMAN AWARDED  THE 2026 AL AND EURITHE PURDY POETRY PRIZE TOM WAYMAN AWARDED THE 2026 AL AND EURITHE PURDY POETRY PRIZE Eurithe Purdy and the Al Purdy A-frame Association (APAFA) are pleased  to announce that Tom Wayman has been awarded the 2026 Al and Eurithe  Purdy Poetry Prize for his collection Out of the Ordinary (Harbour Publishing).  The $10,000 prize recognizes the most outstanding new book of poetry  published in Canada in 2025 by an established poet with five or more  published poetry collections. Speaking from his home in the West Kootenays, Tom Wayman was thrilled  to learn his book had been selected for the 2026 award. “I’m especially  honoured,” said Wayman, “to be awarded the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry  Prize since, in my study where I write each day, a framed photo of Al  glowers down at me-keeping my writing honest, I like to think. Purdy was  helpful to me as a beginning writer in two ways. First, when I was still a  grad student, he named an anthology he edited after the title of a poem  of mine, “Fifteen Winds,” which gave me a huge boost in confidence.  And he included me in his 1971 collection of Canadian poets under 30,  Storm Warning, a kindness that led to my first book being accepted.  Second, the conversational tone of many of Purdy’s poems-a  compositional technique that looks easy to craft, but isn’t-has always  been a model for me: nobody else in the history of English-language  literature beats Purdy at this means to create a poetry anyone can enjoy.” There are two spots left in the April 25 zoom workshop with Stuart Ross, details below. THE GREAT POETRY HEIST Saturday April 25, 2026 at 1 - 3 p.m. ET, via zoom Stuart Ross offers a fun and productive workshop for poets at all levels of experience. We will explore strategies for mining the works of contemporary poets to create our own poems, employing a range of strategies involving ethical thievery, faux translation, ruthless erasure, unconscious collaboration, and affectionate imitation. Arrive with an open mind and leave with a heap of new poems unlike any you’ve written before. Stuart Ross is the author of 23 full-length books, most recently the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky, the Trillium Book Award–winning memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, and the short story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. He has received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, as well as the Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian literature. Stuart has led scores of workshops in Canada, Chile, and the U.S., and has taught at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies for a decade. He was writer in residence at Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa and has mentored at the Banff Centre. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario, just down the highway from Ameliasburgh. To register for the class send an e-transfer for $20 to info@alpurdy.ca Enrollment is limited.   https://www.alpurdy.ca/donate/ Thank you for your consideration, and your support!

Copyright © 2026 Al Purdy A-frame Association, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have supported the Al Purdy A-frame Association. Our mailing address is: Al Purdy A-frame Association 401--4542 West 10th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2J1 Canada Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

A-Frame News: Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize/Stuart Ross Workshop

 

from Jean Baird

March 25, 2026 A few spots are still available for the Stuart Ross workshop, details below. THE GREAT POETRY HEIST Sunday April 26, 2026 at 1 - 3 p.m. ET, via zoom Stuart Ross offers a fun and productive workshop for poets at all levels of  experience. We will explore strategies for mining the works of contemporary  poets to create our own poems, employing a range of strategies involving  ethical thievery, faux translation, ruthless erasure, unconscious collaboration,  and affectionate imitation. Arrive with an open mind and leave with a heap  of new poems unlike any you’ve written before. Stuart Ross is the author of 23 full-length books, most recently the poetry  collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky, the Trillium Book Award–winning  memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, and the short story collection  I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. He has received the Canadian  Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, as  well as the Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian  literature. Stuart has led scores of workshops in Canada, Chile, and the  U.S., and has taught at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies  for a decade. He was writer in residence at Queen’s University and the  University of Ottawa and has mentored at the Banff Centre. Stuart lives  in Cobourg, Ontario, just down the highway from Ameliasburgh. To register for the class send an e-transfer for $20 to info@alpurdy.ca Enrollment is limited.  Canadian Gothic   https://www.alpurdy.ca/donate/ Thank you for your consideration, and your support!

Copyright © 2026 Al Purdy A-frame Association, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have supported the Al Purdy A-frame Association. Our mailing address is: Al Purdy A-frame Association 401--4542 West 10th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2J1 Canada

THE AIR, THE SKY - Stuart Ross's Annual New Year poem

 Dear friends, family, colleagues —

I hope this note finds you all well. And I hope the New Year brings you all days of joy, moments of comforting reflection, warm memories of those precious to you, and maybe a lovely adventure or two.

Here is my annual New Year Poem. I am grateful for the time you spend reading it.

This mailing is dedicated to the memory of my dearest friend Michael Dennis. Please read his poems.

As always, if you want to be removed from this list, just let me know.

Take care.

xox Stuart


THE AIR, THE SKY

There are creatures in the walls.
We hear them scurry and scratch,
gnaw on the insulation
and maybe the electrical wiring.
At night they write poems
on tiny typewriters
about how they hear creatures
outside the walls. They
hear us using our blenders
and pencil sharpeners and various
other contraptions whose purpose
they could never conceive of
and neither could we if no one
had invented them. Another

thing there is is air. There’s so much
of it. You find it between the leaves
of poplars and in the tunnels of ant hills
and bobbing on top of lakes and rivers.
Let’s go breathe some air. Let’s paint
a picture of it. If you don’t get the angles
just right, it doesn’t judge you. The creatures
In the walls mistake the word “poplar”
for “popular” but the “u” doesn’t judge them.
Everything makes mistakes. I have made
twenty or twenty-one of them. Tom Clark
wrote a book called Air. Page 20 has
“A small / black worker ant / moving

diagonally” and Page 21’s got
“A moon in the blue morning.”
The moon is surrounded by
infinite sky, which we’re
connected to by dollops of air.
Perhaps if I wrote a book called Sky
I’d become more poplar.



Stuart Ross
1 January 2021
Cobourg

--
___________________________________________________
Winner of the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize
70 Kippers (w/ Michael Dennis; Proper Tales Press, 2020)
Sos sola una persona (trans. Tomás Downey & Sarah Moses; Socios Fundadores, 2020)
90 Tiny Poems (above/ground press, 2019)
Motel of the Opposable Thumbs (Anvil Press, 2019)
Espesantes (above/ground press, 2018)
Eleven Elleve Alive (w/ Dag T. Straumsvåg & Hugh Thomas; shreeking violet press, 2017)
Pockets (ECW Press, 2017)
Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball (editor; WLU Press, 2017)
Bad Engine: New & Selected Poems, by Michael Dennis (editor; Anvil Press, 2017)
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016)
I am on Patreon! @ www.patreon.com/stuartross

Stuart Ross's New Year's poem for 2020: BOUNCING BALL

Dear friends, family, colleagues, mentors, and those who fit into none of those categories —

As you maybe know, each year I write a poem on New Year's Day, and email it as a gift to many of the people in my life. This past year I lost two close poet friends, Nelson Ball and Richard Huttel. I encourage you all to read their work, and the work of other great poets who've left us in recent years.

Here’s my poem for this new science-fiction-sounding year. If you wish to be taken off this occasional mass-mailing list, just let me know. No hard feelings.

I wish you good health, more than anything — but also happiness, friendship, comfort, community, enriching art, and all the things you want from 2020.

Stuart Ross
Cobourg, Ontario, Canada



BOUNCING BALL

A tour guide appears in your living room,
followed by a cluster of tourists
brandishing wooden spoons. You are sitting
in the old wing chair, reading a hardcover copy
of Marjorie Morningstar. The spirit of your dog
lies curled at your feet, doesn’t even lift
her adorable head to acknowledge
the visitors. You ask these people
not to get fingerprints on your walls,
not to clack their spoons so much, please,
not to draw swastikas on the synagogue,
to help themselves to some fruit, to
maybe have a cup of tea, to file out the back door
and never come back. You tell the tour guide
you are not a monument, a historical plaque,
a famous painting, a notable grave, a landmark.
You pull a couple of twenties from your pocket
and push them into his fist. “I will never forget you,”
you say. Outside, the winter fires are crackling.
A northern cardinal darts out from the smoke,
flourishes its wings, swoops toward the lake
to admire its own reflection. The horizon
undulates. The full moon bounces along it,
like the ball bouncing along the song lyrics
in one of those old cartoons, a technique
invented in the 1920s by Max Fleischer.
You dog-ear your page in the book, pull on
your grandfather’s galoshes, and hobble
after the moon, singing her perfect song,
becoming smaller and smaller yes smaller
as you disappear into the impossible
luminosity of tomorrow.

 

January 1, 2020
Stuart Ross
____________

LESSONS FROM 2014: Stuart Ross

LESSONS FROM 2014

For your information, when
you eat things they go into you.
I learned this last year.
This year, however,
I cannot write a poem. I just
can’t do it. My dog skids
around on the ice outside,
I’m bleeding the radiator
with fifty leeches, seismologists
curl at the foot of my bed,
episodes of F Troop are shot
in my living room, guppies
do tricks in the depths
of my teacup, plus:

confusion is the basic unit
of all living organisms. It has
been dubbed the building block
of life. A single confusion
divides to produce two daughter
confusions. Let’s pack a lunch,
pile into the station wagon
and sit in the driveway.

In closing, then:
Blank sheets of paper
scribble poems on me.
A lamp throws a shadow
into the wastebasket.
The radiance of the night
is just about endless.

 


Stuart Ross
Wednesday, January 1, 2014