“…a committed writer, doing all the right things to perfect his practice and his art” – Rita Bouvier

I nominate Cooper Skjeie. Cooper is a gifted emerging Métis poet from Saskatoon. He has kinship ties to the Métis communities of Duck Lake, Fish Creek, Prince Albert, Portage la Prairie, and St. Ambroise. He is also a descendant of German and Norwegian settlers. As an alumnus of the Banff Centre’s Emerging Writers Intensive, he was longlisted for the 2019 Pacific Poetry Prize, and his work appears in I am What Becomes of Broken Branch, the League of Canadian Poets 2020 Chapbook Series (of which I was a guest editor and the title is a line from Cooper’s poetry), Grain Magazine, PRISM International, and The Mamawi Project Zine.

As his bio attests, he is a committed writer, doing all the right things to perfect his practice and his art. I am currently working with Cooper in a mentor capacity with his first collection of poetry. For this collection, Cooper (in his own words) “draws upon and confronts his lived and familial experience to push against, bear witness to, and liberate the self from the violence of cognitive imperialism, sociopolitical condescension, and the intergenerational impacts of land theft, dispossession, and settler occupation on Métis land. Though often influenced by Métis history and the contentious relationship between Métis people and the Canadian state, the collection offers glimpses into and calls for a world(s) that function outside of settler-colonial logics, pushing towards a sovereign Métis future.”

He “employs lyric and visual poetry to cross through grief, racism, and the ambivalence of becoming amidst the displacement and rekindling of Métis identity within a settler-colonial Canada.” The poems speak to “larger systemic, societal, and ecological issues that reflect an incompatibility with the Canadian state, a collision of worldviews, and an ongoing misunderstanding and devaluation of the Métis as a legitimate Indigenous nation.”