Announcing the winner!
Congratulations to Nicholas Dawson, D.M. Bradford, and Brick Books!
They are the recipients of the third VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award.
Vancouver Manuscript Intensive founded this award to support authors and publishers in creating and marketing exceptional hybrid works of literature. The innovation and quality of the submissions is truly inspiring.
Here is the shortlist for the 2023 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award!
Cyclettes, Book*hug, Tree Abraham
“Aging is like this—as experiences expose more of the world, my annexed wisdoms shrink back into naiveties relative to the ever-expanding whole.” Cyclettes is a moving memoir, a mediation on life’s circularities, the forms, patterns, stories and stages that hold us, dis/connect us, and propel us into motion, a travelogue where topography and typography reveal the nuances of an unscripted life.
Chantal Gibson
About the author:
Tree Abraham is a queer Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer, book designer, and maker of things whose design articles have been published in The Author Journal, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Spine Magazine, and All Lit Up. She has a Bachelor of Social Sciences in International Development and Environmental Sustainability and a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design and Illustration. She is a cover designer for publishers across North America, serves as publisher and art director for Canthius, a feminist literary journal, and is an associate art director in-house at Grand Central Publishing. Her authorship experiments with fragmented essays and mixed media visuals. When not working, she can be found travelling to unmarked places, collecting people, and cycling to swimming spots.
House Within a House, Brick Books, Nicholas Dawson, translated by D.M. Bradford
To get out of these loops, everything is worth a try, to break free of painful thoughts and silences, of the cages we build ourselves, everything is fair game.” Weaving essay, poem and photograph, House Within a House invites the reader to dwell within the walls of depression, to observe the mind, to reorient the body, to listen in the cracks, to touch the light, and to consider what beauty might emerge from the shadows.
Chantal Gibson
About the author and translator:
Born in Chile and based in Montréal, Nicholas Dawson is a writer, scholar, and the Literary Director of Éditions Triptyque. He is the author of La déposition des chemins (La Peuplade, 2010), Animitas (La Mèche, 2017), and Désormais, ma demeure (Triptyque, 2020), for which he received the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Blue Metropolis Diversity Prize. He is also the co-author of Nous sommes un continent: Correspondance mestiza (Triptyque, 2021, with Karine Rosso), and the editor of many anthologies.
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). Bradford is the author of Dream of No One but Myself(Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, was longlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General’s Literary Awards, and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award. House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson, Bradford’s first translation, was published in 2023 by Brick Books. Bottom Rail on Top is their second book.
Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe, Knopf Canada
The proximity startles me. So close to slavery that when my father was two, Harriet Tubman was still alive. Time collapses in on itself; it is not linear; it is a boomerang.” Ordinary Notes is a memoir situated within a brutal, ongoing history of antiblackness and a vibrant archive of Black intellectualism and creativity, a questioning voice in conversation and creation with itself and others, each page a looking back and a turn toward liberation.
Chantal Gibson
About the author:
Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at the Arizona State University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010), as well as Ordinary Notes (Knopf Canada, 2023).
Congratulations to the finalists. We thank our judge Chantal Gibson for her acute reading of these books that push the limits of genre. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Vancouver Writers Fest on Friday, October 20, 2023, 1pm PST and presented $500 by judge Chantal Gibson. The two finalists will also be recognized. You can purchase tickets here and find out more about the panel with Helen Cova, Jason Guriel, Daniel Innes, and Christina Wong hosted by VMI’s Elee Kraljii Gardiner.
2023 Judge
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and cultural institution across Canada and the US.
Gibson published her debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press) in January 2019. Currently on curriculum readings lists across the country, this genre blurring collection is Gibson’s creative response to her own encounters with racism in the classroom. How She Read won the 2020 Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for best book in BC, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021), was long-listed for the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and named a CBC Best Book in 2021. This hybrid text presents a graphic response to the year 2020 bringing a critical lens to the historical representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media.
Recipient of the 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Canada’s prestigious post-secondary teaching award, Gibson teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.