Bren Simmers first PEI resident to win CBC Poetry Prize
Congratulations to Bren Simmers, managing editor of Island Studies Press at UPEI, on winning the 2022 CBC Poetry Contest for her collection of poems, Spell World Backwards. She is the first person from Prince Edward Island to win the prestigious prize.
“I am incredulous and so grateful!” said Simmers. “I’ve always wanted to win the CBC Poetry Prize but never thought it would happen. I know my mom would be proud too.”
The poems in Simmers' collection were inspired by her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s. Simmers began writing journal entries after her mother was diagnosed in 2018 and later revised them into poetry. The poems reflect changes in her mother’s spoken language as her illness advanced.
She will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her poems have been published on CBC Books.
Simmers is the author of three books of poetry: If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021); Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; and Night Gears (Wolsak & Wynn, 2010). Her first book of non-fiction, Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press), was published in 2019.
She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Innovation PEI, and the Squamish Arts Council. She won the CBC Poetry Prize and the ARC Poem of the Year Award, and she was a finalist for The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award. In 2016–2017, she was the writer-in-residence at the Ranger Station Art Gallery in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia. She moved to PEI in August 2018 and has worked at UPEI since then.
