for the Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing
This biennial award is named in honour of Dr. Alanna F. Bondar (1968-2014), an ecocritic, ecofeminist, poet, teacher, and founding member of The Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada / L’Association pour la literature, l’environment et la culture au Canada (ALECC). Alanna was an Associate Professor of English at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and the author of the narrative poetic work There are many ways to die while travelling in Peru (Your Scrivener Press, 2011), as well as many scholarly publications. Alanna was also a passionate educator, writer, gardener, and knitter.In the spirit of Alanna Bondar’s own work, the committee awards the prize to provocative, original, and stimulating books on environmental topics. Interdisciplinary works with a broad appeal within and beyond environmental humanities are sought, as are books with the potential to engage a broader public, as well as students across a range of disciplines and levels. Genres can include fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction, scholarly monographs, and edited collections.
In the spirit of Alanna Bondar’s own work, the committee awards the prize to provocative, original, and stimulating books on environmental topics. Interdisciplinary works with a broad appeal within and beyond environmental humanities are sought, as are books with the potential to engage a broader public, as well as students across a range of disciplines and levels. Genres can include fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction, scholarly monographs, and edited collections.
2026 Memorial Book Prize
Congratulations to Melanie Dennis Unrau, the winner of the 2026 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize, for her book Goose.
Goose, Assembly Press, 2025
The judging prize committee highly praises Goose. In particular, the committee praises Goose for being an “elegant, beautiful, and most importantly, original work that rethinks the words of the ‘father of the tarsands’ to create new perspectives on that place and its relationship to its extractivist history.” The committee was also impressed with the use of erasure poetry to focus and re-tell the histories of tar sands expansion. This incisive reworking of a colonial text was complimented by the wonderful retention of imagery. Along with The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry, this book provides a necessarily complex accounting for Canada as an extractive state.
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a white-settler poet, editor, scholar, parent, and climate organizer from Treaty One territory and Métis homeland in Winnipeg. She is the author of the poetry collections Goose (Assembly, 2025) and Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013), the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024), and the chapbook The Goose (above/ground, 2022). With the other members of the Land and Labour Poetry Collective, Mel co-edited the poetry anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Roseway, 2025). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Mel has edited journal issues, books, and magazines.
Social Media: Melanie Dennis Unrau (LinkedIn)
Link to Publisher’s page: https://assemblypress.ca/shop/goose
Honourable Mentions
Melanie Dennis Unrau, The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.
In the words of the judging committee, “The Rough Poets is a significant achievement of reengaging with what oil work means. It represents a timely and important political intervention into how oil work can be thought of as work, refusing the too-easy associations of oil workers as inherently anti-environmentalist.”
Available at: https://assemblypress.ca/shop/goose
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a white-settler poet, editor, scholar, parent, and climate organizer from Treaty One territory and Métis homeland in Winnipeg. She is the author of the poetry collections Goose (Assembly, 2025) and Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013), the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024), and the chapbook The Goose (above/ground, 2022). With the other members of the Land and Labour Poetry Collective, Mel co-edited the poetry anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Roseway, 2025). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Mel has edited journal issues, books, and magazines.
Social Media: Melanie Dennis Unrau (LinkedIn)
Link to Publisher’s page: https://assemblypress.ca/shop/goose
Susie O’Brien, What the World Might Look Like: Decolonial Stories of Resilience and Refusal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024
The judges praise Susie’s book writing, “The book is a significant contribution to the field of environmental humanities and one that will have impact for years to come. The deep dive into all of the facets of resilience and refusal provides the reader with both a summation of the key texts and a vital path forward. The informed close readings of Brother and the poetry of Billy Rae Belcourt deserve particular attention beside the critical study of urban resilience narratives.”
Available at: https://www.mqup.ca/Books/W/What-the-World-Might-Look-Like3
Susie O’Brien is a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where her teaching and research focus on settler colonialism and the decolonial environmental humanities. Her recent publications include a special issue of Studies in Social Justice co-edited with the Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding Research Collective, titled “Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding: The (In)Humanities, Artistic Practices and Planetary Crisis” (2024); and a special issue of Canada & Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies co-edited with Zahra Tootonsab and Samuel Ikueze, titled “Overburden: Reading/Imagining Extra-Canadian Ecologies.” She is also a team member on the SSHRC-funded project, “Racialized Ecologies in and Beyond Settler-Colonial Canada: Documentary, Speculative, and Poetic Texts and Contexts.”
Isaac Yuen, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World, West Virginia University Press, 2024
The prize committee highly praises Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World, writing that this collection of funny, lyrical, smart essays is a pleasure to read. It also makes the reader think about non-human/ human interactions and biomimicry in a new and original way. It is a truly engaging and fun read.
Available at: https://wvupressonline.com/utter-earth
A first-generation Hong Kong-Canadian author, Isaac Yuen’s short fiction and creative nonfiction has been published in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Orion, Pleiades, PRISM International, SAND Literature and Art, Shenandoah, The Willowherb Review, and other publications. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, he was a writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Literature in Switzerland, a Science Meets Fiction fellow at the HWK Institute for Advanced Study in Germany, and an artist-in-residence with the La Napoule Foundation in France. Together with Michaela Vieser, Isaac is the co-author of The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination (Reaktion Books, 2025) and The Atlas of Deep Sea Features: Stories and Soundings from the Depths(Ullstein Verlag, forthcoming 2027). Learn more about Isaac on his website at https://ekostories.com/ or on Instagram @utter_earth.
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Past Awards
Click on the links below for information on the finalists and winners in previous years.