UNews - Waubgeshig Rice

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto student captures ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest

trevor.kenney — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 22:11:28 +0000

Seeking to rediscover her voice, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto student Chido Muchemwa entered The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest on a whim and produced the grand prize-winning submission. Her story, If It Wasn’t for the Nights, was deemed the best of 187 entries from throughout the country and earned her the $7,500 first-place award, the largest cash prize for student writing in Canada.

Bridge Prize winner Chido Muchemwa

“When I submitted to the Bridge Prize, I never thought I would win. I did it impulsively because I felt I needed to do something to convince myself that I was indeed still a writer,” says Muchemwa, a Zimbabwean writer currently living in Canada and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the U of T. “My father died in 2020, and I felt like words abandoned me.”

Muchemwa was joined by three other finalists as award winners for the biennial event. The Bridge Prize was established in 2019 by the ULethbridge School of Liberal Education and Vancouver-based alumnus and donor Terry Whitehead (BA ’94). It is Canada’s only national short story competition open exclusively to post-secondary graduate and undergraduate students studying at Canadian universities and colleges.

Each of the other three finalists, Lily Scriven (York ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ), Eliza Ives (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of New Brunswick), Fernando Tarini (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary), earned $1,000 prizes, while each winning author also earned $200 gift cards from major sponsor Munro’s Books. Waubgeshig Rice, who is also a juror for the 2022 Giller Prize, served on the Bridge Prize jury and is enthused about the quality of writing from the post-secondary generation.

“Serving on the Bridge Prize jury has been a major career highlight,” says Rice. “The stories submitted provided me a thorough glimpse of the exceptional talent among emerging writers in Canada today. I was captivated by the craft and content in each of the submissions, and I look forward to reading more from these gifted authors in the future!”

Muchemwa’s work was praised by juror Lisa Moore.

“The language is transparent, unadorned, and concise — an elegant piece of writing. The story is jampacked with nuanced moments, calibrations of tension and a kind of uneasy epiphany — not sentimental but ephemeral and beautifully satisfying,” she says.

For Muchemwa, whose work has appeared in Lolwe, Augur, Catapult, Baltimore Review and Bacopa Literary Review, the act of putting her ideas into a story again was cathartic.

“If It Wasn’t for the Nights is the only new story that I have been able to write since 2020,” she says. “The Bridge Prize is a much-needed confidence boost, and a reminder that the process doesn’t have to be perfect to produce good, meaningful stories.”

Muchemwa has an MFA in Creative Writing from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Wyoming in 2014 and has been shortlisted twice for the Short Story Day Africa Prize and placed second in the Humber Literary Review’s 2020 Emerging Writers Fiction Contest and in the 2022 Prism International Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction.

Eliza Ives wrote Office Story, which was noted by juror Joan Thomas as being, “Sly and witty, it captures the soul-destroying daily realities of life in a contemporary bureaucracy. The dialogue is terrific. So expertly done — Office Story reads like a published work.”

Juror Sam Wiebe was impressed by Lily Scriven’s Women in the Morning Light.

“Thoughtful and elegantly written, clever but not flippant, with resonant themes of art, history, and female perspective,” says Wiebe. “An enviably smooth prose style.”

Fernando Tarini’s Durian Days was praised for its “Clever angle, refreshing take on grief and youth,” by juror Francesca Ekwuyasi.

About the Bridge Prize

• Established in 2019 and first awarded in 2020, a new competition will run every second year.

• Total prize money for the Bridge Prize is $10,500, with $7,500 to the winner and $1,000 each to three finalists.

• 187 stories from students attending 48 post-secondary institutions in nine provinces across Canada were entered for 2022.

• An initial group of 30 local jurors, comprised of campus and community-based ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and cultural leaders, read all 187 stories. Each story was read by a minimum of three jurors, after which the field was narrowed to the top 70. Every local juror then read each of the 70 stories before 10 were sent on to the main jury.

• The six-person main jury was comprised of authors, artists and educators Francesca Ekwuyasi, Lisa Moore, Waubgeshig Rice, Bill Richardson, Joan Thomas and Sam Wiebe.

• For more, visit the Bridge Prize web page.

Bridge Prize Main Jury finalized for 2022 national literary competition

trevor.kenney — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 16:59:08 +0000

The Bridge Prize, Canada’s largest literary prize for post-secondary students, has finalized its jury for the 2022 competition — and it features some of the country’s most accomplished authors.

“We are delighted to announce that our 2022 Bridge Prize Main Jury includes some of Canada’s most beloved authors and emerging writers,” says Dr. Shelly Wismath, dean of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s School of Liberal Education. “The jury includes award-winning authors who have won significant literary prizes across multiple genres of fiction.”

The jury consists of Joan Thomas, Bill Richardson, Lisa Moore, Waubgeshig Rice, Frencesca Ekwuyasi and Sam Wiebe.

“We are especially pleased that the 2022 jury is truly pan-Canadian, with authors based in five different provinces from coast to coast,” adds Wismath. “We are grateful for their time, expertise and commitment to supporting the next generation of writers in Canada.”

The Bridge Prize is a biennial short story writing competition established in 2019 by the School of Liberal Education. The competition is open to any student attending a post-secondary institution in Canada. Sara de Waal, a graduate student at University of British Columbia, won the first Bridge Prize, including $7,500 for her story Cecilia and Richard. A total of 340 stories representing 61 post-secondary institutions were entered in the inaugural competition.

“We are excited to announce our two partners, The Walrus and Munro’s Books of Victoria, are returning to sponsor the 2022 Bridge Prize,” says Terry Whitehead (BA ’94), Bridge Prize founder. “We are grateful for their ongoing support and their commitment to inspiring students to pursue their passion for writing.”

Submissions for the 2022 competition open March 30, 2021 and will close January 22, 2022. For more information on the Bridge Prize and to view the inaugural winning entries, visit: go.uleth.ca/thebridgeprize.

Following are short biographies of the jurors for the 2022 competition.

Joan Thomas

Joan Thomas’s 2019 novel, Five Wives, won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Joan is the author of three previous novels: The Opening Sky, Curiosity, and Reading by Lightning. Her work has won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the McNally Robinson Prize, and has been nominated for the Giller Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a previous Governor General’s Award. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Prize for a writer in mid-career. She lives in Winnipeg.

Bill Richardson

Bill Richardson lives in Vancouver and in southwest Manitoba in the rural municipality of Louise. He writes for children and adults. I Saw Three Ships: West End Stories, was published by Talonbooks in 2019. Forthcoming from Running the Goat Books and Broadsides is Hare B&B, with illustrations by Bill Pechet. He is a past winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast.

Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore was born and raised in St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada and currently teaches creative writing at Memorial ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ. She has written three collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, and Something for Everyone, and three novels, Alligator, February and Caught, and a young adult novel called Flannery.

Alligator and Caught, and her short story collection Open were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her novel February was long listed for the Man Booker Prize and won CBC Canada Reads in 2013.

Waubgeshig Rice

Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. He has written three fiction titles, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies. His most recent novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. He graduated from Ryerson ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s journalism program in 2002 and spent the bulk of his journalism career at CBC. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and two sons.

Francesca Ekwuyasi

Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging. Francesca's writing has been published in THIS Magazine, Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and GUTS Magazine. Her story Ọrun is Heaven was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize and her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread for the 2020 Scotia Bank Giller Prize. She currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Sam Wiebe

Sam Wiebe is the award-winning author of the Wakeland novels, one of the most authentic and acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Invisible Dead (“the definitive Vancouver crime novel”) and Cut You Down (“successfully brings Raymond Chandler into the 21st century”). Wiebe’s other books include Never Going Back, Last of the Independents, and the Vancouver Noir anthology, which he edited. Wiebe’s work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award and the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus, and City of Vancouver book prizes. His original film/tv projects have been optioned, and his short stories have appeared in ThugLit, Spinetingler, and subTerrain, as well as anthologies by Houghton-Mifflin and Image Comics.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge launches third annual edition of Common Book Project

trevor.kenney — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 19:17:05 +0000

As the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s School of Liberal Education kicked off the third annual Social Justice Symposium, it also launched its Common Book Project by introducing author Waubgeshig Rice’s novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow.

It is the third successive year of the Common Book Project, one of the first initiatives sparked by the School of Liberal Education when it was founded in July 2017. The project encourages all students, faculty, staff, alumni and interested community members to read a book chosen for current relevance. A number of courses will use the book as a required text, and book-club events will be held throughout the year.

“The School of Liberal Education was founded with the goal to promote a broad integrated education that develops in our students evidence-based reasoning skills and engaged citizenship,” says Dr. Shelly Wismath, dean. “This project embodies those ideals through a shared experience, and I encourage everyone to participate by reading the book.”

Anyone with a U of L ID can get free online access to the book through the U of L Library. Books are also available in the U of L Bookstore and Lethbridge Public Library.

The idea of having a group of students read and discuss a common book began with a One School One Book project in the United States in the early 2000s. The idea spread to Canada, and Lethbridge was actually the first place in the country to take up a similar project in 2007. This past spring, Lethbridge School District No. 51 introduced One District One Book, where all of its students, from kindergarten to grade 12, read the same book.

This year’s selection for the Common Book Project, Moon of the Crusted Snow, relates to Truth and Reconciliation Commission themes and contributes to Indigenization and reconciliation on campus.

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.

Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist originally from Wasauksing First Nation. His first short story collection, Midnight Sweatlodge, was inspired by his experiences growing up in an Anishinaabe community and won an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2012. His debut novel, Legacy, followed in 2014. A graduate of Ryerson ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s journalism program, Rice has worked in a variety of news media since, reporting for CBC News for the bulk of his career. In 2014, he received the Anishinabek Nation’s Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nation Storytelling. He currently hosts Up North, CBC Radio’s afternoon show for Northern Ontario.

Rice will take part in the annual Word on the Street Festival on Saturday, Sept. 21, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. outside the Lethbridge Public Library’s main branch. He will do a reading at 3 p.m. and then sign copies of Moon of the Crusted Snow at 4 p.m.

UNews - Waubgeshig Rice

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Toronto student captures ��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest

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