UNIVERSITY OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
Island Studies Press editor wins prestigious poetry award

Bren Simmers, managing editor of the Institute of Island Studies' Island Studies Press at UPEI, has won the 2025 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, awarded by the League of Canadian Poets, for her poetry collection The Work.

The League of Poets administers three poetry prizes to celebrate the past year's best published works: the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for debut books, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for books by Canadian women, and the Raymond Souster Award for books by League members. The winner of each prize receives $2,000.

In The Work, Simmers explores the themes of loss and grief and how one can make themselves whole again after being broken. She writes of churning in an accumulation of losses the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law's terminal illness and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness.

The Work was among the finalists for the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

In addition to The Work, Simmers is the author of three other books of poetry: If, When (2021), Night Gears (2010), and Hastings-Sunrise (2015), which was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. She won The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize in 2023 for Cloud Études and the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize for Spell World Backwards, which is included in The Work. She was previously longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2013 and in 2012 for Science Lessons.

Pivot Point, her first book of non-fiction, which was published in 2019, is a lyrical account of a nine-day wilderness canoe journey and a frank reflection on the roles that friendship, mindfulness, and creativity play in the evolution of people's lives.

Simmers has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Victoria and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree from the University of British Columbia. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Innovation PEI, and the Squamish Arts Council.