Dora
Prieto
Dora Prieto (she/ella) is a Mexican-Canadian poet, editor, and translator. She was a 2023 finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and her poem “the withholding map” won the 2022 Room Magazine Poetry Contest judged by Lillian Allen. Prieto’s interdisciplinary poetry work has been exhibited at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, the International Comics Arts Festival, Ignite! Festival, and the Belkin Art Gallery. She enjoys sharing poems, the tools of poetry-making, and an ethic of community arts practice in Vancouver, where she lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations.
Award History
Jury Citation
“‘Notes on the Non-Place’ unfolds the shapes of the unique and common whileinspecting 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 Winner
Writers’ Trust MentorshipCitation
“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 Mentor
