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Open Season Awards—meet the judges

Conor Kerr—poetry judge

Conor Kerr Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian educator, writer and harvester. He is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and is descended from the Gladue, Ginther, and Quinn families from Lac Ste. Anne & Fort Des Prairies Métis communities and the Papaschase Cree Nation. Conor is a harvester, labrador retriever enthusiast, and NDN Mario Kart champion. In 2019 he received The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson poetry award and in 2021 The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize. His first books, a poetry collection An Explosion of Feathers and a short story collection Avenue of Champions will be published in 2021.

Read an interview with Conor Kerr to see what he's looking for in a winning poem.

Zilla Jones—fiction judge

Zilla Jones Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian criminal defence lawyer, anti-racism educator, mother, singer, and writer from Treaty 1 in Winnipeg. “Crossing” won The Malahat Review’s 2021 Open Season Fiction Award. She has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and shortlisted twice for the Writers Union of Canada short prose competition, The Fiddlehead fiction contest, the Missouri Review Perkoff Prize for fiction, and the Freefall Magazine prose contest. She won Honourable Mention in the Room Magazine fiction contest, first place in Prism Magazine's Jacob Zilber short prose competition, and first place in the GritLit Festival short story contest. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire.

Read an interview with Zilla Jones to find out what she's looking for in a winning story.

Erin Soros—creative nonfiction judge

A settler writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Erin Soros builds her projects through academic research, working-class narratives, and insight from a decade as a rape crisis counsellor and literacy coordinator within Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood where she has family roots. She has received national and international awards for her poetry and nonfiction, such as The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and a place in Best Canadian Poetry 2020 (Biblioasis) for her long poem “Weight” as well as a 2021 National Magazine Award for the lyric piece “Cord,” which earned gold for “One of a Kind Storytelling.” Her fiction, which draws on oral history with BC loggers, has received the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Award for the Short Story. This year she is a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University, writing a collection of hybrid essays on trauma-induced psychosis and the psychiatric and police response to it.