Huge congratulations to Dawn Muenchrath for winning the Guild Prize in Poetry for her poem, "You've heard loneliness is the smoking of our digital age!"
Dawn Muenchrath is a writer originally from rural Alberta. She currently lives in Saskatoon where she is completing her MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan. Her work has been published by Grain, Arc Poetry Magazine, Every Day Fiction, and in media res. She has two cats.
On winning the contest, Dawn tells us, “I feel so grateful to have been selected as this year’s winner of The Guild Poetry Prize. As a new writer, particularly as someone who is more comfortable writing prose than poetry, this award feels like a huge vote of confidence. I enjoyed the puzzle of writing this poem, and I’m excited to continue working on my craft as a poet!"
About Dawn's winning piece, our Guild Prize Poetry Judge, Dr. Micheline Maylor, says, "This prose poem does a few things that elevate to the winning piece. First is the manipulation of the energy in the work. The author moves us from cold, to lack, to a metaphor of cold and writing, cold and loneliness, cold and life, cold and math. All of this cumulates in the ideas of energy and the way time erodes energy, hearkening back to the science teacher in the first lines. There’s a universality of experience to the piece that speaks of human experience beyond political. The sentences and fragments are tightly woven, and skillful in complexity. This is an experience every reader can relate to and I give this author kudos for mastery of scene, language, and message."
Read Dawn's winning piece in the next Freelance, coming soon!
Huge congrats to the Honourable Mentions Iyla L. Ottoson for "Injustice," and Diana Hope Tegenkamp for "CHROMA: An Erasure of Derek Harman's Chroma, A Book of Colour."