Dear ALECC Members,
it is with great delight that we announce the 2024 Alanna Bondar Literary Prize winner, Heather Davis for her book Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022). Here is a link to the publisher’s website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/plastic-matter
We would like to express our deep gratitude to the judges for this year’s prize, their generosity in sharing their time, love of reading and writing, and critical appreciation of creative and scholarly works engaging with environmental issues. The judges this year were Finis Dunaway (Chair) and 2022 Alanna Bondar Prize winner, Sonnet L’Abbe, and Paul Huebener. Sonnet was present at ALECC’s 2024 Biennial conference in Waterloo, Ontario to share their announcement to attendees. Claps and hoots followed.
The judges observe, Plastic Matter asks, how can we envision good relations with the non-human when there is no future unsaturated by plastic? Ina work of exquisite prose and sparkling theorizing, Heather Davis argues that the expectations plastic fulfills – of pliability, consumability, and disposability – have shaped Western modernity’s relation to matter itself. Following fascinating analyses of the geological relations of plastiglomerate, and of photography that maps how petrochemicals disrupt time and bodies, Davis proposes that we consider plastic-eating bacteria a new kind of human progeny, a queer kin from whom we can learn new forms of responsibility.
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School in New York. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, visual culture, and queer theory she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s ubiquity. She is the editor of the award-winning Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017) and co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.
Congratulations, Heather, on the success of your book’s launch and winning the Bondar Prize! Great news!
Folks, please send your congratulations also to four amazing Honourable Mentions for this year’s prize. The selection of submitted books made for a competitive year. The Honourable Mentions are as follows:
Aaron Kreuter, Shifting Baseline Syndrome (University of Regina Press, 2022)
Aaron Kreuter’s collection Shifting Baseline Syndrome starts out with a glib tone that belies a genuine grief propelling the poems. Merciless in its skewering of a society that processes nearly all experience through the lens of consumerism, this book casts flora, fauna, and oceans as the straight guys to human bumbling imbecility, then draws us into tender personal mourning for a Jewish grandma whose radical activist sensibilities the poet may or may not have inherited. A poem imagining the possibility of “hik[ing] the land together” with a Palestinian cousin is a particularly timely read. By the book’s end, we hear Kreuter’s satiric wit as a poignant coping strategy honoring the fervent lovers of life and land who have come before.
https://uofrpress.ca/Books/S/Shifting-Baseline-Syndrome
Aaron Kreuter‘s most recent poetry collection, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and the 2023 Vine Awards for Jewish Literature. His other books include the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs, the short story collection You and Me, Belonging, and, from spring 2023, the academic monograph Leaving Other People Alone: Diaspora, Zionism and Palestine in Contemporary Jewish Fiction. A new short story collection, Rubble Children, came out in summer 2024 with University of Alberta Press. A novel, Lake Burntshore, is forthcoming from ECW Press in April 2025. Aaron is an assistant professor in English Literature at Trent University. Find Aaron on X @aaronkreuter; on Instagram @aaronkreuter8.
Tanis MacDonald, Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022)
Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female shows how the everyday act of walking is tied to the politics of gender and to the claims that people lay to the land each time they set foot in it. Rather than portraying walking as a matter of inspirational wilderness hikes, Straggle uncovers how walking can illuminate what it means to live with trauma, chronic pain, and settler-colonialism. Whether she is screaming in an empty field during a Covid lockdown or walking cautiously through a place where a sexual assault has occurred (that is to say, anywhere), MacDonald reveals the implications of walking in full force. A work of political weight and arresting images, Straggle will change what it means for you to step outside. https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/products/straggle-adventures-in-walking-while-female
Tanis MacDonald (she/her) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female and six other books. Straggle was awarded an Honourable Mention for the Betsy Warland Between Genres Prize. Tanis has won the Open Seasons Award for Nonfiction in 2021, the Northern Ontario Writers Award for Nonfiction in 2023, and has twice been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. She serves as the General Editor of the Laurier Poetry Series and hosts the podcast Watershed Writers, featuring writers in the Grand River Region. Tanis is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, situated on traditional Haudenosaunee territory. With Ariel Gordon, Tanis co-edited the special “Moving on Land” issue of The Goose (2023). New writing has recently appeared in FreeFall, CV2, Consilience, and Abridged.
Mariam Pirbhai, Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak and Wynn, 2023)
Mariam Pirbhai’s Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging asks probing questions about whose cultural knowledge, and whose visions of the land, people in Canada are reproducing in our yards, gardens, and public spaces. As an immigrant to Canada, Pirbhai also asks what it means for her to be “another kind of occupant – dare I say, a new kind of settler – on Indigenous lands.” From the cultural histories of grass lawns and tamarinds to the question of whether mulberry trees should be allowed to bear fruit, this perceptive memoir illuminates the politics and pleasures of the plants we nurture and the plants we exile. https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/products/garden-inventories-reflections-on-land-place-and-belonging
Mariam Pirbhai is full professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes and teaches courses in postcolonial and diasporic literatures, and creative writing. Her newly released book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), was a 2023 Foreword Indies finalist for Nature/Nonfiction. Pirbhai is also the author of a novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022), winner of the 2024 Independent Publishers’ (IPPY) gold medal for Multicultural Fiction and silver medal for Regional Canadian Fiction, as well as a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), winner of the 2018 Independent Publishers’ (IPPY) and 2019 American BookFest awards. She has also authored and edited pioneering academic works on the literatures of the global South Asian diaspora, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and has served as President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (formerly known as CACLALS), Canada’s longest-running scholarly association devoted to postcolonial and global anglophone literatures. She resides in Waterloo, Ontario, where she is grateful to live and work in the traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The daughter of Pakistani immigrants to Canada, Pirbhai has come to see in this land a deep wellspring of inspiration, as academic, creative writer, gardener and occasional dabbler in landscape painting. Find Mariam at https://mariampirbhai.ca/; on Instagram @mariampirbhai/; or on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/people/Mariam-Pirbhai/pfbid07RMRFAMctgJtqYUU9ffVK5DXAk8RGdar37cjvvqE9bfMfMeccj8PKGynqdQKjWXhl/;
Stephanie Rutherford, Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022)
Stephanie Rutherford’s Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada reframes our understanding of an iconic species. Drawing on a diverse array of literary texts and other sources, Rutherford illuminates how affect—including responses like fear, disgust, and devotion—has shaped and structured human-wolf relations. Theoretically astute and strikingly original, this book places the wolf at the centre of the Canadian story to address vital questions of power, nationhood, and sovereignty. Readers will think anew about wolves, while also grappling with the legacies of settler colonialism, the insights of Indigenous knowledge, and the meanings of the nonhuman in the Anthropocene.
https://www.mqup.ca/villain–vermin–icon–kin-products-9780228011088.php
Stephanie Rutherford is an Associate Professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. Her research inhabits the intersections among political ecology, human-animal relations, and environmental justice. Find Stephanie on X @WolfieProf or https://www.stephanierutherfordphd.com/