Magical / Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villareal (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024)
Runaway, Jorie Graham (Ecco Books, 2020)
The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Anchor Books, 2022)
Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney (Nightboat, 2020)
Magical / Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villareal (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024) Runaway, Jorie Graham (Ecco Books, 2020) The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Anchor Books, 2022) Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney (Nightboat, 2020)
Currently Reading:
Dora Prieto is a poet and translator based in Vancouver and Mexico City. Her poems have appeared in Maisonneuve, Catapult, Capilano Review, and more.
A 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she’s finishing her first book, Girl Tejido, and making experimental community work with the El Mashup Collective.
Praise for my Work
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“In her manuscript draft 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’Abbe, Writer's Trust Mentorship
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“‘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.”
- Cicely Belle Blain, shalan joudry, and Sue Sinclair (2023 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers Poetry Jury)
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“The Withholding Map names an unnamed war and the river of time itself flows-on differently in arrivals and departures. The poet creates a wandering imagistic journey of choices without choice submerging language evoking song, memory, self, and searching and seeking. The land becomes memory and memories are stored across multiple points inside and outside of time, inside and outside of nature, stored in the psyche even as one grasps for that one moment of deep awakening flowing to merge longing and discovery.”
- Lillian Allen, Room Magazine Guest Judge
Here are some of my poems
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self-portrait as an airport
every day I look a little different
a coming and going on dirty carpet dreams
in the mornings I try to draw my hoop earrings
they end up looking like Venn diagrams
I was built on ghosts, wetlands, fossils
an unsettling way of answering “hi, where to?”
I am used to this: promising too much
there will be delays in terminal 5
a pair of sisters contemplate the duty-free
a shiny yellow deception, they steal a coke
I hold them, cradle them but my breath is stale
I supply a moving walkway, they carry on
in me, they are a 3-month salary spent landing
intent to feel like a hug, a family, a nation
so I take them down the runway like Bella Hadid
all limber bounce and exacting cat-eye takeoff -
debris
to break apart, to write myself
with and inside [the absence]
what will I do with all these old photographs?
I lay down next to the silhouette
the sound of a car speeding on a highway
give me a language with which I can weep for my brother
the room is full of almosts
“us”—a prize, a story—
stop. a door, a window;
brilliant green beginnings without horizon -
guava, july, scissors
folding a map changes the representation of space
a fold is a non-place
cutting and rearranging an image warps time and meaning
a non-place is a collage, an airport, a jail cell, an interval
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