Armand Garnet Ruffo WINS VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
Congratulations to Armand Garnet Ruffo for winning the 2024 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award for his book The Dialogues; The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow.
The award is given to an exceptional title of Canadian literature that celebrates the hybrid and unclassifiable through innovation in form.
Of The Dialogues, Award Judge Stephen Collis had this to say:
In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, Armand Garnet Ruffo transforms a libretto (still embedded at the heart of this book) into a fully-formed documentary poem, effortlessly blending production notes and an extended reflection on the process of writing and recovering Indigenous history. This is a story of the First World War, and one Indigenous Canadian’s spiritual journey and political awakening. But it is also a wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of war writ large, from the bible to Gaza and the “war against the very planet that sustains us,” tracing a path that connects the unmarked graves of residential schools and Great War battlefields. I don’t really know how Ruffo does it—balancing all that he brings into focus here—but he certainly does it, with wisdom and humour, insight and poetry. Like veteran and activist Francis Pegahmagabow himself, we are invited to “take a piece of one of the branches” of this book, place it in our mouths, “and become the grey earth.
