rob mclennan : 2026 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Rachel Robb

Rachel Robb
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

 

Rachel Robb​ is a writer and educator of Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her poetry has been featured in the Bridport Prize anthology and shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Robb’s work has also appeared in anthologies for the gritLit Festival and The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story. She won the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize for her poem, “Palimpsest County.” Robb is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She lives in Toronto.

The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.

What first brought you to poetry?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the past year. Poetry seems to me the most honest and graceful way of making sense of the world and my place in it.

What is it about writing, specifically poetry, that provides you such clarity?

For whatever strange reason, it is the easiest route for me to access my unconscious self, that mysterious centre that seems to be able to make weird, open-eyed observations about things. After this initial rush of feeling, the editing begins, which for me is a more intellectual process of rewriting, throwing everything out, then pulling it back out of the bin, perseverating over word choice and the like.

Have you had any models or mentors for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What work has struck you, enough that it took hold?

Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris affected me deeply. Mostly I follow tangents and recommendations from friends or poets I read in The New Yorker. I’m always discovering new poets. There are so many beautiful poets in the world! Recently I stumbled upon Tyehimba Jess and I’m obsessed.

What is it about Glück’s The Wild Iris, or Jess’ work, that specifically strikes? And how do or might those influences show up in your work?

Poems told through the voice of flowers. What an idea! It still blows my mind. I admire Glück’s ability not only to create such devastating imagery from the natural world, but somehow to make tangible the essence, or the soul, of the flora and fauna around us. That’s something I strive for in my own writing, though I’ve not reached it yet.

With Jess’ poetry, I’m floored by the hybrid, wild style of his poems. For example, his poem about the musician Sam Patterson is written in interview form and so many of his poems use styles I’ve never encountered before, like contrapuntal poems, where the lines can be read vertically, horizontally, diagonally. It’s wild how he plays with form. I’m still figuring his poems out. Maybe one day I’ll take risks like that in my own work.

How are you finding the process of attempting to build a full-length manuscript? Is the shape coming naturally through clusters or more difficult? Have you a shape in mind as you work?

I don’t yet have a shape in mind. I’m actually terrible at identifying throughlines. In fact I wrote a poem about it. I write about what sparks curiosity for me in a given day and really dislike writing to a predetermined theme, so I think many of my poems feel quite disparate from one another. I will definitely need outside eyes when pulling together the final manuscript.

How do your poems begin?

Usually something in nature catches my attention. For example, I found a dead juvenile Cooper’s hawk in the forest by my father-in-law’s place and it was so perfectly preserved despite all the muck and ice around it or I pass this gorgeous bed of orange tulips each day on my way to work and they’re at the stage where they’re falling over themselves, really delicious, but clearly on their way out. It percolates for a week or so, depending on my schedule. I have a full-time job and kids and a dog, so writing has to wait until those domestic obligations are fulfilled.

Or I’ve read something by an author that moves me and I respond to it poetically.

Another time I had a dream about owls that shook me up, so I wrote about it that week.

Is the act of writing one you see as physical, even visceral?

Not for me personally, but maybe others experience this. Although walking always helps get the ideas flowing.

 

 

 

 

The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He recently returned from a week quietly working at the Banff Centre, during which time he participated in karaoke twice, was part of a livestream reading, and stayed up well past his usual bedtime to hang with an group of Canadian playwrights.

rob mclennan : 2026 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Jeremy Audet

Jeremy Audet
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

Jeremy Audet is the Non-Fiction Editor at yolk and Founding Editor of Canto. His writing has been awarded the Bridge Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the CBC Short Story Prize, and others. He is a 2026 Writer-in-Residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-Frame Association and lives in Montreal. 

The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.

What first brought you to poetry?

I’d written French poetry in high school, but mostly abandoned reading and writing for some years. One day in class my impressionable young-adult brain, having barely settled from the young-adult antics of the night before, encountered John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I teared up. He’d somehow put into perfect words the same questions, heartaches, and convictions I was experiencing two centuries after him. I guess it was an epiphany. I registered for an English degree and started reading again.

I wrote sometimes, mostly romantic little odes or ekphrastic poems while travelling, but I first started writing poetry as a serious pursuit midway through my degree. I devoted two weeks one winter break entirely to typewriting a thirty-page poem, which was really a mosaic of ideas and language from all the writers I wanted to emulate. Woolf, Auden, Barbauld, Keats, Ginsburg, Eliot, Whitman. It was a terrible poem, but once I’d written it I felt that, okay, I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, now I can write my own poems. In the years since, I’ve been blessed with incredible mentors both academic and creative, all of whom have kept that initial epiphany going.

How did you get from that point to starting to send out work? What did that process look like? Once you moved beyond those original poets, who were your more contemporary models or mentors?

As part of my Honour’s thesis I studied twentieth-century literary magazines in Canada. I also co-edited the literary journal at my university, Bishop’s, for an issue. Some friends were also starting their own journal – yolk, for whom I now work – and so the process of submitting work for publication seemed relatively accessible. I was very methodical about it: I created a spreadsheet with my poems on the y axis and journals on the x axis, and started submitting. I can still go back and see which publications rejected a poem before its eventual publication. It’s also a good way to keep track of which poems I should keep working on. Most poems of mine have gone through four, five, six significant rewrites before their eventual publication.

I remained pretty loyal to the romantics and modernists until I encountered Derek Walcott. Omeros is a masterpiece that shattered my conception of what poetry made possible. I read it every year. Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin write in Walcott’s general legacy, and I admire their works to a great measure. Etel Adnan and Linnea Axelsson, too, are writers in translation I’ve modeled some work from. I focussed on ecopoetics during my Master’s, Nicholas Bradley being one of those aforementioned mentors and also a poet I admire, so I also have to highlight the impact of Rita Wong, Don McKay, and Derek Mahon on my own writing. Recently, though, and perhaps in keeping with my Walcottian orbit, I’m reading Seamus Heaney.

You say you originally began writing in French. Is there a difference in the way you might approach writing in French, as opposed to English? Is French a language you still explore through your work?

I've only recently returned to reading and writing in French. Despite it being my mother tongue, I spent most of my youth in English schools abroad, and with the exception of high school continued in English when I moved to Canada. The little French writing I have done is more colloquial, phonetic, usually short portraitures or lyrics. I approach it more carefully, thinking slowly as I go.

But French has been entering my English work in substantial ways as of late. Two of the poems that consist of “EARTH GIGANTIC” directly engage with the French language, asking questions about interlingual exchange, impossible translations, and what it means to have a tongue in both mouths. The major project I'm working on this year – a novel – has French-English dynamics as a central motif.

There’s a French word, dépaysement, I can’t stop thinking about. A literal translation would be “the feeling of being un-countried,” but there is no adequate English counterpart. I grew up all over the place, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and still move around frequently. In Québec I’m a francophone who’s adopted English. In British Columbia I hid my French roots. Dépaysement is my natural state of being – it runs through all my work, I’d say.

This is something I’ve discussed prior with Regina-based poet Jérôme Melançon, who composes and publishes poetry separately in English and French. His own writing follows different trajectories, in part due to the poetry of each language often following separate influences. Do you find similar considerations across your work in French or English? Is your writing in one language only, or even predominantly, impacted by writing you’ve read in that language? Or is it simply a difference of the way you think through each language?

I haven’t written enough in French to speak to that alone. But I would absolutely say the French books I read penetrate my poetry in English.

In Québec, especially Montreal, there’s stark differences between French and English poetry when considering structure, style, narratives. The English scene consists predominantly of individual poems, for instance, while collections in French often lose titles altogether, benefitting from a stream-of-consciousness looseness that generates a much more poetic reading experience. I’ve found more resonance with the French collections, stylistically, than with my English contemporaries in book form.

I don’t know Jérôme's work, but I find his practice fascinating, and something I would like to aspire to. I’ve recently begun translating some of my own poems into French and re-translating them into English after some time away, as a sort of creative exercise. I would like to eventually translate my own poetry in full, because yes, the way I think in one language differs from the other entirely. Humour, musicality, syntax, sensation – all changes.

How does a poem begin for you?

I’ve had poems begin with the title. Some with a news article. Some with a single line recycled again and again. “Archipelago,” which is included in the shortlist package for the Bronwen Wallace Award, began with a very simple wordplay-on-title image: a grown up and child passing a paper back and forth beneath a door. “Albedo Effect,” which was finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, has a double origin: while I was quite literally restoring footage of my grandfather installing powerlines in Nunavut sixty years ago, I was also reading a wonderful essay by Nadim Roberts titled “Mangilaluk’s Highway,” about three Inuit boys who fled a residential school and attempted to walk home by following powerlines; only one survived, and the poem is a sort of compression of multiple griefs.

A poem never just forms out of thin air. I don’t believe in that “fleeting inspiration” thing. Sure, I too have been struck by the odd image and thought up a line or two on the spot, and sure, I too will sit down and write with passion for hours at a time because the words are just pouring out of me, but for me those aren’t poems. Those are drafts. The poem comes after, once you’ve chipped away at it, thrown it out entirely, rebuilt it, etc. Even the most commonly-accepted first-draft poems are not first drafts at all. Ginsberg revised “Howl” over long periods. Whitman wrote and rewrote Leaves of Grass forever. The poem is the fruit of tireless labour. And barely any of that labour actually takes place on the page.

I’m curious how you might see your editorial work, whether at yolk or Canto, in conversation with your own writing, if at all. How does your editorial work impact your own work, and vice versa?

I’ve become better at self-editing, that’s for sure. Going through so many submissions you also notice the clichés more, the trends, what people are writing about already, how they’re writing. When I first started as an editor for yolk, I read Canadian journals en masse, to get a sense of what quality to aspire to and what people were publishing. I’ve permitted myself to track down a quote from Hélène Cixous: “Literature itself has read. It doesn’t just arrive like that. It has read. I have read this, this, and this, it says, and it passes itself on.” No attentive reading will ever make you a worse writer. Even the poem within which you see nothing of value tells you, well, okay, this is how not to write. But even then, as an editor, reading something within which I see little value at first becomes an exercise in compassion. Okay, this has meant something to someone; how can I get close to that meaning?

And that practice, in turn, makes you a more compassionate reader of your own work. And this is vital: to be compassionate is to be able to get closer to what literature has read before you,. as Cixous says, to move back in time along that lineage of writing and sit with it, let it sit within you. That is the altruistic value of editorial work. And the editorial conversations I have with other writers are always fruitful. The whole process nourishes my work indirectly, I'm certain. Just allotting the space to engage with other writers daily keeps the poetic spirit dynamic and thinking and ready. Who knows what comes out of that space, and when?

I know you’re scheduled for a residency this fall at the Al Purdy A-Frame. Have you particular plans for your time there?

I’ll be organizing a panel and a workshop on the poetics of wildfire, hopefully with some panelists from across disciplines. In my personal time there, though, I hope I can complete this long, long poem I’ve been developing on my time spent as a wildland firefighter in British Columbia. I’m still not sure what shape it’ll take, whether book-length or chapbook etc., but it’s been in the works for well over a year now... I’d like to get it done while I’m there.

Though I’ll also be taking some time to work on this novel. I’m taking a course right now with the authors Madeleine Thien and Sarah Moss that fittingly enough wraps up the day I get to the residency, so the novel will be fresh in my mind, and I’ll probably make considerable headway on it while there. Though it’s hard to say. I’m particularly excited about the panel, though. My friend Janelle Levesque just spent the month of April there and hid a note for me. Depending on how well she hid it, I might spend a lot of time going through every little crevice in the place. But I might also spend my whole time there walking around the woods and lake. Make some stews. Maybe run into a bear. That’d be time well spent.

 

 

 

 

The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He has garnered the occasional writing and writing activity award, but never a book award.

 

rob mclennan : 2026 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Renato Gandia

Renato Gandia
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

 

Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores the intersections of identity, faith, sexuality, and migration. His poetry won the 2025 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2026 Open Season Awards at The Malahat Review and the 2025 Fiddlehead Poetry Contest. His short stories have appeared in international queer anthologies, and his personal essay appears in Magdaragat. Gandia’s debut portfolio comprises three completed, unpublished manuscripts: his memoir Unpriesting, his poetry collection Eating Rice on Our Feet, and the literary novel Anatomy of Compersion. He and his husband live in Calgary.

The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.

What first brought you to poetry?

I came to poetry through language before I understood it as poetry. I grew up in the Philippines, where language is already textured. Tagalog carries rhythm, repetition, and silence in a very particular way. Even in everyday speech, there’s a kind of compression and implication.

I was actually quite reluctant to write poetry at first. I didn’t know if I had something to say, or if I could say it in a way that mattered. And writing in English made it even more challenging, because it’s not my first language. I was very aware of that distance.

But I kept returning to poetry anyway. When I started writing more seriously, I realized it was the form that allowed me to hold onto that sensibility—to write with restraint, to lean into what can be suggested rather than fully explained. It gave me a way to be indirect, but still truthful.

How did you get from that point to starting to send out work? What did that process look like? Had you any models or mentors?

I came to sending out work a bit indirectly. An essay I wrote was published in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, and through that I met Patria Rivera. She was one of the first people who really encouraged me to take poetry seriously.

At the time, I told her I didn’t write poetry because I didn’t really understand how it worked. Back in the Philippines, one of my closest friends, Niles Jordan Breis, was already an accomplished poet. We had both tried writing poetry earlier on, but I felt like I was too slow to learn the form, and I eventually gave it up. Watching him go on to win awards only made that feeling worse.

But Patria said something that stayed with me—that poetry doesn’t have to begin with mastery, it can begin with expression, and that the precision it demands can be its own reward. That shifted my perspective. I started reading poems more closely, especially in journals, paying attention to how they move and where they go quiet. I began attending workshops, trying to understand the form from the inside out.

One winter, I submitted to a contest at The Confluence Historic Site & Parkland in Calgary, and I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the winners. That was just enough confidence to keep going.

After that, I kept sending work out. Sometimes I’d send poems to Patria and ask her to look them over. She’d come back with suggestions—specific, useful ones—and the work would get stronger. There were many rejections—more than acceptances—but I kept coming back to her voice, and to the memory of standing with seven other poets at the Confluence. I would feel the disappointment, of course, but it usually passed after a few hours. And then I’d return to the work. That persistence, more than anything, is what kept me moving.

How does a poem begin for you?

A poem usually starts with a feeling for me—something that’s been sitting with me for a long time, even if I don’t fully understand it yet. I think of myself as an emotional writer in that sense.

Sometimes that feeling is tied to memory. For example, I wrote a poem about the Second World War in the Philippines, and it began with something very small—I remembered a Japanese dentist who once gave me advice about a malocclusion when I was in Grade Four. That memory stayed with me, and over time it opened into something much larger.

Other times, the starting point is external—a song that moves me, or a film I can’t stop thinking about. I don’t always begin with a clear idea of what the poem is about. It’s usually an emotional response first, and then I follow it—through image, through memory—until something takes shape.

So the process is less about deciding to write a poem, and more about recognizing when something is asking to become one.

Your author biography mentions three unpublished manuscripts: a memoir, a poetry collection and a literary novel. How easy or difficult has it been to work across different forms simultaneously? And do you see any conversation between these works in different forms, or are they, in your mind, completely separate?

The different forms actually emerged at different points in my writing life, though I’ve come to realize they’re all in conversation with each other. I started with the memoir. That was the first manuscript I completed, and I think it came from a need to make sense of lived experience directly—particularly around faith, migration, identity, and queerness.

While I was doing early revisions of the memoir, I enrolled in Gotham Writers Workshop’s short fiction course. I wanted to understand how fiction worked from the inside. Later, I took Fiction II, which focused on novel writing, and that eventually led me to begin working on a literary novel. Fiction gave me a different kind of freedom. It allowed me to explore emotional and relational complexity through invention rather than strict lived experience.

Around that same period, I also began writing poetry more seriously. At first, I didn’t think of myself as a poet at all. But I found there were certain emotions and images that poetry could hold more precisely than prose could. Over time, the poems accumulated into a manuscript of their own.

So, in my mind, the forms aren’t really separate. They’re different ways of approaching many of the same questions—faith, longing, family, desire, belonging. Sometimes a question I can’t answer in memoir reappears in fiction. Sometimes a memory becomes compressed into a poem.

The challenge, of course, is that each form asks for a different rhythm and mindset. Memoir asks for emotional honesty and accountability to lived experience. Fiction requires architecture and patience. Poetry asks for precision and restraint. Moving between them can be difficult, but I also think each form sharpens the others.

What is interesting is in how this suggests you see your work-to-date, or at least these three manuscripts, as part of a single, larger and possibly ongoing project. Is that a fair assessment, or is this an idea that applies only to these three specific works?

I think that’s a fair assessment, though I didn’t consciously begin with the idea of building a larger project. At first, each manuscript felt separate to me because they emerged at different moments and in different forms. But over time, I started recognizing the same emotional and thematic concerns resurfacing across all of them.

When I started writing seriously, I realized I was consistently returning to the perspective of a Filipino gay man navigating faith, migration, family, and identity. Growing up in the Philippines and later immigrating to Canada shaped the way I see the world, and I became interested in bringing Filipino sensibilities into English-language writing—particularly the way emotion, silence, obligation, and tenderness operate in Filipino culture.

I also became aware of how few queer Filipino voices I was encountering in Canadian literature. Not that they didn’t exist, but it felt to me like there was still space for more stories from that perspective—stories with complexity, contradiction, and interiority. I think that awareness naturally began shaping the work I was drawn to across memoir, fiction, and poetry.

So while the forms are different, I do think the manuscripts are in conversation with each other. Sometimes a question I can’t answer in memoir reappears in fiction. Sometimes an emotional experience becomes compressed into a poem. At least right now, they all feel like part of the same ongoing attempt to understand experience through language.

 

 

 

 

The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He recently bested a black bear in hand-to-hand combat, although only through technical foul.

rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Nicole Mae

Nicole Mae, for “Prairie Bog”
read Mae’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.

Nicole Mae is an interdisciplinary artist. Their poetry, films, and artworks reflect themes of nostalgia, longing, Prairie queerness, Hungarian diaspora, ill body, shame, and romantic love. Mae teaches poetry, hosts creative writing workshops, and runs a multimedia art subscription called Love Letters. Mae lives in Treaty Four, otherwise known as Southern Saskatchewan.

What first brought you to poetry?

I’ve been writing ever since I was a kid but it was during my upperclassman years of high school that I found my way to poetry. My creative writing teacher saw value in my poems before I did. She encouraged me to submit them to magazines and to attend local writing retreats. I was apprehensive at first, but the Saskatchewan poetry community was so welcoming. I found myself wanting to be a part of it. It was around this time that I met my first love as well. Instantaneously, I started writing poems every day. I studied up on the Beatniks, listened to word-heavy rappers, and bought as many books as I could afford. 

Who were you reading? What poets were prompting your writing?

At that time, the poets I found most inspiring were Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Tyler Knott Gregson, Rudy Francisco, and Pablo Neruda. I also loved studying song lyrics. People like Lauryn Hill, Tupac, Nas, Nonname, Lana Del Rey, Nujabes, and Hotel Books inspired me greatly too.

What were those writing retreats you were attending, and how did they help inform your writing?

I attended a writing retreat called Creating in the Qu’Appelle a couple of times. Unfortunately, it’s no longer up and running. I had some wonderful mentors though—Jennifer Still, Evie, Ruddy, and Sheena Koops being a few. Attending Creating in the Qu’Appelle was pivotal to my journey as a writer because it was the first time I found myself surrounded by a community of storytellers. The energy was invigorating. There were spoken word readings, literary workshops, rap performances, Indigenous and trans keynote speakers, and forest cabins full of new friends. Plus, all of my mentors nudged me towards poetry. I had been writing a magic realism novel at the time, and they all expressed enthusiasm for my prose and descriptive language. They told me to apply it to poetry.

What did those first poem efforts look like? And how do you feel your work has developed across the time since?

In the beginning, my poems were impassioned and raw—full of bluntness and urgency. They focused on exposing specific feelings and experiences rather than shaping them with intention. Over time, I’ve developed a deeper understanding of craft, and have refined my work to become more thoughtful, immersive, and vivid. I feel as though I can express my stories and experiences with more ingenuity now. 

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 process felt organic! Prairie Bog is a part of a larger, finished manuscript. It was quite fun sifting through it to find ten poems that could best encapsulate its geist. I wouldn’t say I learned anything new about my poems but instead revisited some tender memories and experiences of mine. 

What strikes me about some of the poems in your selection is the physicality, the immediacy, of the landscape. How important is landscape to your poems?

Landscape is deeply significant to my poems because it holds many memories. Throughout my life, I’ve retreated to prairie fields, lakes, and hills to process grief. When language has felt out of reach, and my body has carried more pain than I could manage, the land didn’t ask for explanations. It offered its presence and a place to sit. There’s such solace in cold winds, shuffling grass, birdsongs, and Western sun. People are often surprised at my fondness for Saskatchewan because the politics are quite dreary here. There are cruel and unjust bills being imposed right now—all of which affect me directly. Gender diversity, disability justice, and reproductive rights are being trampled on, and I’m working hard with my communities to oppose that. Simultaneously, I’m able to remind myself that our land is not our politics. Our land is wiser and stronger than any system we’ve built. I can still find queer joy and mind/body healing when I leave my house every day.

How do you see your work in relation to the work of other Saskatchewan poets?

My poetry is definitely distinctive—written from uncanny experiences, linguistic experimentation, and a gender-bent perspective. This being said, I do share a deep sincerity and earnestness with other Saskatchewan poets. While our approaches to poetry may differ, there’s a common thread of authenticity and gratitude that connects our community.

Tell me about the multimedia art subscription Love Letters.

Love Letters is my monthly snail mail project! Each month, I write a letter and include an art piece (such as a poem, zine, sticker, photograph, painting print, etc.) that goes along with it. I started this project at end of 2024 with the interest of distributing my art and writing in a tactile way. With the rise of malicious social media and AI art theft, I wanted to create an intimate, safe, and slow-paced experience for those who want to engage with my work. It’s been a lot of fun making small art and sharing life events as they happen in real time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Dora Prieto

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.