Bronwen Wallace | |
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| Born | May 26, 1945 |
| Died | August 25, 1989(1989-08-25) (aged 44) Kingston, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | Queen's University |
| Occupation(s) | poet, writer, teacher |
Bronwen Wallace (26 May 1945 – 25 August 1989) was aCanadianpoet andshort story writer.
Wallace was born inKingston,Ontario. She attendedQueen's University, Kingston (B.A. 1967,M.A. 1969). In 1970, she moved toWindsor,Ontario, where she founded a women's bookstore and became active in working class and women's activist groups. In 1977, she returned to Kingston, where she worked at awomen's shelter and taught atSt. Lawrence College and Queen's. She wrote a weekly column for theKingston Whig-Standard. In 1988, she was writer-in-residence at theUniversity of Western Ontario.
Her collections testify to hersocial activism involvingwomen's rights,civil rights, andsocial policy. A primary focus of her work wasviolence against women and children.
In a series of letters published in1994 asTwo Women Talking: Correspondence 1985-1987, Wallace and poetErín Moure discussfeminist theory. Mouré defends thelanguagephilosophers (particularlyWittgenstein) who demonstrate that our speech, and the concepts expressible in language, govern our knowledge and actions. However, Wallace disagreed that language-centred writing rescues women from the patriarchy, claiming that it can be easily co-opted by patriarchs. Society's use of politically correct language, she notes in the book, bears this out. Wallace believed that by engaging her readers in the issues of violence, she could provoke change in the reader and hence in society.
Wallace died of cancer in 1989. Her first and only published collection of short stories,People You'd Trust Your Life To, was published posthumously byMcClelland & Stewart in1990.
TheRBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, founded by friends of the poet and theWriters' Trust of Canada, was originally an annual prize given to a young and promising poet or fiction writer who is under the age of 35 and unpublished in book form. In 2021, in response to feedback from the publishing industry and a drafted open letter by MFA candidate and editor Jade Wallace, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers opened eligibility to poetry and short-fiction submissions from writers of all ages unpublished in book form.[1]
In 1984, Wallace won thePat Lowther Memorial Award for her poetry collection,Signs of the Former Tenant.[2]
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