The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Dora Prieto, MFA. Dora’s graduate thesis is a collection of poetry entitled Girls of the Now.
Dora Prieto came to the program with plans to write a polyphonic novel spanning three generations of a Colombian-Canadian family, drawing from her family’s roots in rural Colombia. She then switched her genre to poetry, which proved odd, surprising, and capacious. She also discovered a love of comics and has published in Capilano Review, Catapult, GUTS magazine, and Maisonneuve. Her poem “the withholding map” won the 2022 Room Magazine Poetry Contest and she was shortlisted for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. She considers poetry a social praxis, and gives community workshops and a series called El Mashup for Latinx youth in Vancouver.
Dora’s collection of poetry, Girls of the Now, is a process of inquiry that delves into authority, identity, eroticism, and gender, through a speaker brimming with longing, frustration, humour, and arrogance. Using both poetic verse and embroidery, the poems move associatively in monostich interspersed with Zuihitsu prose poems. Modified sonnets, reminiscent of the Seussian style, punctuate the sequence, imposing constraint amidst fluidity. The sequence moves through multilingual poems too, including a series of Spanish sonnets inverted on the page, gesturing toward the speaker’s Latin American heritage and welcoming bilingual readers.
Contact
Request more information about Dora’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.