KATE CAYLEY is the author of three poetry collections, including Lent, a young adult novel, and two short story collections. How You Were Born won the of the Trillium Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. She has won the O. Henry Short Story Prize, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, and the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. She has been a finalist for the K. M. Hunter Award, the Carter V. Cooper Short Story Prize, and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize and the CBC Literary Prizes in both poetry and fiction. Cayley's plays have been produced in Canada, the US and the UK, and she is a frequent collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre. Cayley lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.

"Eventually, most of the things one loves fill one with worry, and, paradoxically, the more deeply one loves, the more quickly one is filled. Poetry fills me with worry—because, thankfully, it is always changing. But Kate Cayley's Lent, though it is filled with love and worry, doesn’t worry me at all—not because it isn't new; it's as new as tomorrow—but because it is so well made. These are poems that are completed by their encounters with difficult things—they do not take note of, they live with. And they read the way the best poems do, like parts of one returned to one. I love this book; it does not worry me." —Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal

“I didn’t think I’d forgotten how close poetry can get to us—inside our eyes, below our thoughts—but reading Kate Cayley’s poems, I feel newly awed at their sure and profound nearness.” —Sadiqa de Meijer, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of alfabet/alphabet

“Gorgeous and startling, the poems in Kate Cayley’s Lent emerge as a testament to poetry itself: the desire to grapple with an imperfect world, and yet respond with praise. ‘Show me/the pith of my own heart,’ she writes, despite the darkness. These are poems filled with hope, searingly intelligent, by one of our country’s finest poets. Lent is a wonder.” —Steven Price, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Lampedusa