Dora Prieto, for “Loose Threads”
read Prieto’s shortlisted work here
2025 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
Established in memory of writer Bronwen Wallace, this
award has a proven track record of helping talented developing authors secure
their first book deal. Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works
of unpublished poetry and short fiction. The 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award will be
announced on June 2, 2025.
Dora Prieto [photo credit: Adri Montes] was a 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers poetry finalist and a 2024 Writers’ Trust Mentorship participant. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, Capilano Review, and Catapult. Prieto won the 2022 Room Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Prieto shares the tools of poetry-making through a project called El Mashup, a workshop for Latinx youth on experimental poetry, fiction, analog cinema, sound art, and performance. She lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
What first brought you to poetry?
I credit two amazing poets and teaching artists: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Sheryda Warrener. Both teach at UBC. I started the MFA in fiction in 2021, after quitting a job in communications I was really struggling with, and having done little creative writing prior. One of my first classes was with Billy-Ray and he introduced me to poets who became foundational for me: Ada Limón, Natalie Díaz, Tommy Pico, Aracelis Girmay, and Victoria Chang, among others. After taking an incredible class with Sheryda the following summer, it was set: poetry had claimed me and I had to claim it back. Sheryda helped me get in touch with my deeper inquiry and taught me how to get out of my own way (usually by tricking the brain into submission). I really got hooked after that.
Now. There are many ways to think about the question of what first brought me to poetry, and another answer could be this: growing up between Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and San Cristóbal de las Casas in southern Mexico, my identity and way of thinking was formed through betweenness and attempts to bridge those worlds, cultures, languages, family members, and realities. A lot of poetry is written into rupture, so once I started reading more poetry, I recognized immediately the sense of urgency and attempt, of mending, and of the multiple selves that the speaker gives voice to. My sister Rosa and I are first gen university grads and I spent most of my 20s doing hard labour jobs, so the language of poetry wasn’t really in my world until I did the MFA. But once I got there—BOOM—I was in deep!
Jumping into a literary MFA from, as you say, “having done little creative writing prior,” is an enormous leap. What were you hoping to gain, or even jettison, through such a program?
Haha yes, I’m aware there’s a bit of a flex in that. I came into the MFA hoping to write a polyphonic, multigenerational novel spanning Colombia, Mexico, and Canada—a way to document my family history and get closer to the complex real-life characters of my geographically and culturally disparate family. That didn’t end up being the right approach for me, but it was the original engine, and in some ways it’s still running beneath the work I’m doing now.
I also applied out of a kind of desperation. At the time, I was deep in my first desk job—something I’d worked hard to land, only to find it soul-crushing—and the pandemic had cracked open a lot of the capitalist myths that shaped my undergrad ideas of success. When I asked myself what kind of writing I’d do if money weren’t involved, it wasn’t the freelance music journalism I was doing for free concert tickets, and it definitely wasn’t the website copy, social media, and newsletters I was writing for work.
I’ve always been a heavy reader—books were a lifeline during a pretty unstable childhood spent moving between countries. International, but not in the sexy, middle-upper-class way. So even though the MFA terrified me, when I got in, I figured: at worst, it would be two years that didn’t advance a “career,” and I could always go back to communications. Or go back to firefighting, which I actually think is a much better job (more on capitalism’s lies in the poems!) In the end, I didn’t write that novel, but I found poetry—and a new way of listening to language, memory, and history—that feels far more alive to the questions I was trying to ask in the first place.
Once you made your way to poetry as your form, did the poems come quickly, or was it still a process? What were those first pieces attempting, and how close did they get to what you’d been hoping?
A trickle and then a rush. My first poems felt direct and honest in a way that my fiction hadn’t. They were primarily lyric and narrative, often with an elegiac tone, á la Ocean Vuong. Mimetic, to some degree. I remember the shock, delight, and significant imposter syndrome I felt when my first poem was published in Catapult (RIP) when Billy-Ray was on the editorial board. Jorie Graham’s words, “A poem is an experience, not the record of an experience,” became a crucial lesson for me, leading to a shift toward more looseness, humor, and freedom within the lyric “I.”
The “rushing” really started in Sheryda’s class in May 2022. Since then, I’ve been writing quite a bit—10 to 50 pages of poetry a month—and reading voraciously. I’ve never felt so intrinsically motivated by something, and I’m incredibly grateful that things aligned for me to discover poetry amidst all the randomness. Sheryda has an exceptional talent for guiding students to produce their best work through interdisciplinary, process-driven, and material explorations. Under her guidance, my poems became more expansive, layered, and deeply engaged with an inquiry process, rather than existing as isolated pieces. She not only taught me to love poetry but to love it in my own way.
The submission process for the Bronwen Wallace requires putting together a small, chapbook-length selection of your poems. What was that process like, to assemble your poems into such an order? Did you find it difficult? Enlightening? Did you learn anything about your poems by attempting to put them together into something for submission?
The poems are from my manuscript, which I’ve been editing, rearranging, and expanding since I graduated from UBC last May. The submitted selection came from what was draft six of the manuscript, and I'm currently on draft eight!
When putting the packet together, I focused on choosing poems that I felt best represented the collection as a whole, were among the strongest pieces, and shared enough thematic and narrative connections to flow together, even without the surrounding poems in the full manuscript.
The process of shaping those ten pages was actually very beneficial. It pushed me to make cuts for the submission that I might not have otherwise had the motivation or courage to do.
I like how your poems are built as accumulations of phrases that appear, at first glance, to be straight, but then bend a bit. I see you quoting Anne Boyer at the offset, but where did this adherence to the deceptively straight phrase emerge?
I started writing in monostich during a 2023-24 christmas visit to Mexico. Between family obligations, little time alone, and intense conversations, my Notes App got full of potent fragments I needed to jot down, but that didn’t cohere together. When I revisited them to send to my mentor (I was on a thesis deadline at that point), I kept them mostly in that form, more out of lack of time than anything else.
My mentor, Sheryda, recognized something compelling in these isolated lines and encouraged me to explore them further, rather than reverting to my usual stanza structures. She introduced me to francine j. harris’s “Single Lines Looking Forward” and other monostich poems, which helped me appreciate the unique power of the single line. It offered a directness that my previous use of enjambment and line breaks hadn't achieved.
A single line feels exposed, urgent, and definitive. It can even hold a certain audacity. And what really captivated me was the potential for associative movement created by a line break after every line. When each line of poetry is followed by a line of absence, the leaps between ideas intensifies. I also find a connection to the concise nature of tweets and memes, and elsewhere in the manuscript, I explore how the assertive yet often capitalized-upon voice of girls online adds another dimension to this form.
I’m still learning so much from the single line—how much weight it can carry, the sensation of taking a step and then encountering open space, and the challenge of balancing a sense of forward movement with the pleasure of associative jumps.
How did you get involved in El Mashup, and how has that informed, or been informed by, your work?
Daniela Rodríguez, a dear friend and collaborator, and I started El Mashup in 2021. Our paths crossed in 2019 at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival’s (VLAFF) Youth Jury, and we recognized the lasting impact of having a creative, leftist space for Latin Americans. Noticing a gap in similar opportunities for Latin/e/x youth between 13 and 18 years old in Vancouver, we decided to create a program focused on building community, developing skills, and exploring artistic expression. El Mashup has since grown into a collective of five members, and we now operate out of the Clinton Park Fieldhouse in Vancouver, a three-year residency.
At its heart, El Mashup embraces interdisciplinarity, mashing up everything from creative writing to experimental film, sound, and performance. While my own poetry work is more traditionally rooted, El Mashup inspires me to experiment more—this winter I’m making an experimental documentary that blends poetic travelogue and family research in Colombia. I think El Mashup also reminds me to connect my practice with the community whenever I can. Dani and I aspire to be the “weird art aunties” who encourage them to keep creating!
Born in Ottawa,
Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa,
where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine
McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories
(University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day
(Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary
Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of
above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a new chapbook lands with Ethel Zine in June. The current Artistic Director of
VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic
year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
