Magical / Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villareal (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024)
Magical / Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villareal (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024)
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Dora Prieto (she/ella) is an emerging poet based in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. She is currently editing her debut poetry manuscript, and her work appears in publications including Acentos Review, Capilano Review, Catapult, GUTS magazine, the Ex-Puritan, and Maisonneuve.
Her poem “the withholding map” won the 2022 Room Magazine Poetry Contest, her manuscript draft was selected for the 2024 Writers’ Trust Mentorship award, and her poem "Girls of the Now" was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. She is also co-translating an award-winning poetry book titled JAWS by contemporary Mexican poet Xitlalitl Rodríguez, with support from the Canada Council. She enjoys sharing the tools of poetry-making in her community, rooted in a project called El Mashup, a workshop for Latinx youth that centers hybrid practice and amateurism in experimental poetry, fiction, analog cinema, sound art, and performance.
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