John Elizabeth
Stintzi
John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Stintzi’s work has won the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and has been longlisted for The Journey Prize and National Magazine Awards. They are the author of the novel Vanishing Monuments, which is currently shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award; the poetry collection Junebat; and the forthcoming novel My Volcano. Stintzi lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
Award History
Jury Citation
“'Selections from Junebat' is a compelling collision of content and form disrupting gender identity and reckoning with the liminal and silent space that such disruption instigates. John Elizabeth Stintzi’s poems rely on the breaking of grammar and syntactical sequences as well as a re-visioning of Wallace Stevens’ 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' to assert an authentic identity in the speaker’s private and public life. This reckoning and reclamation of self asks readers to consider their own concepts of gender and the difficulties that are faced when gender norms are disrupted. These are brave and timely poems."
—2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Jury (Jordan Abel, Sue Goyette, and Emma Healey)
