Eng shortlisted for Warland Award
August 25th, 2026
Vancouver poet, educator and community organizer Mercedes Eng has been named to the six-author shortlist for the 2025 Warland Award for her latest collection, cop city swagger (Talonbooks, $19.95).
Administered by the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (VMI) and founded in 2021, the annual award—formerly known as the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award—celebrates innovative, hybrid-genre Canadian literature. Named in honour of acclaimed author, poet and mentor Betsy Warland, the prize spotlights groundbreaking works that resist conventional genre categorizations.
Selected by this year’s sole juror, UBC Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies Phanuel Antwi, the shortlist highlights authors working across poetry, memoir, theory and experimental form.
In Cop City Swagger, Eng employs a hybrid poetics combining personal memoir, official state documents, media montage and photography to conduct an incisive threat assessment of policing in Vancouver. Centring lived relationships to the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown, the prairie-born writer—whose previous collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize—juxtaposes institutional rhetoric with community care and resistance.
Eng is shortlisted alongside five other Canadian authors:
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Christine McNair, Toxemia (Book*hug Press)
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Vinh Nguyen, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse (HarperCollins)
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Susan Holbrook, Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology (Coach House Books)
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Valerie Bah, Subterrane (Véhicule Press)
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Tracey Lindberg and George Littlechild, The Cree Word for Love (Sâkihitowin) (HarperAvenue)
All six finalists will read from their nominated books during a free, public Zoom event on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM PT, where judge Phanuel Antwi will announce the winner.
Email warlandaward@gmail.com to RVSP!
More information and event registration details can be found at warlandaward.ca.
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