Vancouver’s Dora Prieto and Jess Goldman win RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers

Annual prize presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada carries $10,000 for each recipient, along with access to skill development and mentorship opportunities

By emily lyth

Jess Goldman and Dora Prieto

VANCOUVER-BASED AUTHORS Dora Prieto and Jess Goldman, and Toronto’s Phillip Dwight Morgan are the winners of this year’s RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.

Prieto earned the prize in the poetry category for her collection Loose Threads, while Goldman’s Tombstone of a Tsaddik secured the short fiction win. Morgan’s book White Trucks and Mergansers achieved success in creative nonfiction, an inaugural category for the award.

Presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers includes a $10,000 prize for each recipient, along with access to skill development and mentorship opportunities. The annual prize goes to writers whose works are published in literary journals or anthologies, but whose books are not yet published.

Prieto was a finalist for the award in 2023 and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize last year. Her project El Mashup allows her to share writing tools with Latinx youth through workshops on experimental poetry, analog cinema, sound art, and beyond. Loose Threads addresses such themes as migration, gender, and climate change. In a release, jurors Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader, and Sanna Wani called the poems in the collection “borderless, wry, and yet deadly serious”.

Goldman, who is a writer, comic artist, and amateur puppeteer, explores the intersection of Yiddishkayt (Yiddish culture, art, and language) and queer culture in their work. Tombstone of a Tsaddik “sparkles with freshness, strangeness, and 1 of 3 precision,” wrote jurors Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Baharan Baniahmadi, and Shashi Bhat, “immersing readers in an unforgettable depiction of a small Jewish religious community whose faith in God is shaken.”

Morgan is journalist, writer, and editor of Jamaican heritage. He has been published in such outlets as Maclean’s and the Walrus. His essay collection White Trucks and Mergansers addresses Blackness, nature, and memory within the context of Ontario’s Point Pelee National Park. Morgan’s writing “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.

Six other finalists each received a $2,500 prize. These include Cicely Grace for Rather Her Clean and Nicole Mae for Prairie Bog in the poetry category; Alexis Lachaîne for Three New France Suicides and Hana Mason for Training the Replacement in short fiction; and Huyền Trân for Where Do Mothers Go and Graham Slaughter for Breach in creative nonfiction.

The three winners were announced yesterday during a Toronto ceremony hosted by writer Alison Pick, who herself received the award in 2002.  

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