Dora
Prieto
Dora Prieto 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.
Writers & Books
Award History
Jury Citation
“Stitch by monostich, Loose Threads pulls at the warp and weft of culture, history, and language to show us where identity and poetry are formed. Dora Prieto tests the integrity of poetry to hold what it promises against the gales of migration, gender, race, climate change, and the nation. 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. These poems are borderless, wry, and yet deadly serious.”—2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award poetry jury (Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader, and Sanna Wani)Jury Citation
“Notes on the Non-Place unfolds the shapes of the unique and common while inspecting the mourning and power of belonging. Dora Prieto whispers, cajoles, and shakes loose personal particles of the human journey. These poems, rich in layers, require us to lean in further with the poet through uncertainty and joy. We follow until we arrive, interwoven in a new way.”
Program History
2024 - none
Writers’ Trust Mentorship
Citation
“In her manuscript Girls of the Now, Dora Prieto is skeptical of identities and asks important questions about the power a girl can wield when the future has become ‘a collection of disasters.’ Tracing interpersonal and familial connections through metaphor, Prieto suggests that poems are threads of embodied desire and extensions of blood’s trajectory. Her refusal to inhabit stable categories of ethnicity, gender, or monolingualism makes her poems exciting assemblages of language. Prieto’s youthful, worldly verse offers a sparkling example of what poetry can do right now.”—Sonnet L’Abbé, 2024 Poetry MentorWorks Recognized by WT