Emerging writers Dora Prieto, Jess Goldman and Phillip Dwight Morgan win $10K RBC Bronwen Wallace Awards
The prize recognizes unpublished writers in poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction
Dora Prieto, Jess Goldman and Phillip Dwight Morgan were named the winners of this year's $10,000 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for emerging Canadian writers.
The prize recognizes emerging Canadian writers for poetry, short fiction and, for the first time this year, creative nonfiction, who are unpublished in book form.
The awards were established in 1994 to honour the life and career of Bronwen Wallace, a poet and short story writer who felt that writers should have more opportunities for recognition early in their careers.
Prieto is the winner of the 2025 poetry prize for her poem Loose Threads.
"The poems that I submitted for this award are the result of a few years of concerted effort and reflection and layering of the work through mentorship, through community, through all of those things," Prieto told CBC Books after the ceremony.
"It makes me really feel like the words are getting to people and they really come from the deepest part of my heart. It just makes me feel really seen."
She previously made the Bronwen Wallace poetry shortlist in 2023 and participated in the 2024 Writers' Trust Mentorship program.
Her work has been published in Acentos Review, Capilano Review and Catapult. Prieto won the 2022 Room Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. She lives in Vancouver.
"Through thrilling leaps of association and rhetoric, Prieto's lines move like light through fibre-optic cables, connecting family and memory, belonging and alienation, violence and joy," wrote jurors Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader and Sanna Wani in a press statement.
"These poems are borderless, wry, and yet deadly serious."
These poems are borderless, wry, and yet deadly serious.- Jurors Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader and Sanna Wani
The other finalists for the poetry prize were Cicely Grace and Nicole Mae. They will each receive $2,500.
Jess Goldman won the short fiction prize for their story Tombstone of a Tsaddik.
"It does feel wild to win an award for the story I wrote because I feel the era that I write about, turn of the century, Jewish Eastern European culture and everything that was going on at that time politically is not something that's talked about a lot," Goldman said in an interview.
"I feel like it's incredibly niche, especially with the Yiddish in there. So I feel very thankful that there's actually an audience for that."
Goldman's work has been published in Maisonneuve, CBC and Room.
They graduated from the University of British Columbia's creative writing MFA program and they live in Vancouver.
"The narrative sparkles with freshness, strangeness, and 1 of 3 precision, immersing readers in an unforgettable depiction of a small Jewish religious community whose faith in God is shaken," wrote jurors Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Baharan Baniahmadi and Shashi Bhat in a press statement.
"Jess Goldman's risk-taking prose transcends to the level of magic, leading to an ending that defies both expectations and easy explanations."
Goldman's risk-taking prose transcends to the level of magic, leading to an ending that defies both expectations and easy explanations.- Jurors Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Baharan Baniahmadi and Shashi Bhat
The other finalists for the short fiction prize were Alexis Lachaîne and Hana Mason. They will each receive $2,500.
Phillip Dwight Morgan is the winner of the inaugural prize for creative nonfiction for White Trucks and Mergansers.
"What I was trying to do with the piece was layer histories and meanings to complicate the way that we approach land," he said in an interview. "Point Pelee is a place that's heralded for birding and for its vistas and all those things are true, but also it's a place marked by precarity and displacement and hardship."
"Hopefully it'll encourage people to contemplate their own relationships to land in new ways and to think more critically about settler colonialism and about white supremacy and many of the oppressive forces that plagued this land."
Morgan is a first-generation Canadian writer of Jamaican heritage. His work has been published on CBC News and in Maclean's and The Walrus. Morgan is currently working on an essay collection. He lives in Toronto.
"Through rigorous research and outstanding literary craft, he reveals a legacy of racialized violence, cross-species intimacies, and a symphony of migratory birds that refute borders," said jurors Omar Mouallem, Alessandra Naccarato and Lindsay Wong in a press statement.
"White Trucks and Mergansers establishes Morgan as a vital voice in the urgent work of witness and truth-telling today."
White Trucks and Mergansers establishes Morgan as a vital voice in the urgent work of witness and truth-telling today.- Jurors Omar Mouallem, Alessandra Naccarato and Lindsay Wong
Huyền Trân and Graham Slaughter were the finalists for the nonfiction prize and will each receive $2,500.
The winners' work can be found on the Writers' Trust website or on Apple Books.
Last year's winners were Nayani Jensen and Faith Paré.
Michael Crummey was the first writer to receive the prize. Other past winners include Maria Reva, Jeramy Dodds, Alison Pick and Alissa York.
The Writers' Trust of Canada is a charitable organization that seeks to advance, nurture and celebrate Canadian writers and writing. Its programming includes 11 national literary awards, financial grants, career development initiatives for emerging writers and a writers' retreat.
