The winner of this year’s Herb Wyile Prize in Canadian Literature is Billy Johnson for his essay “A.B. Walker’s Neith (1903-04) and the Aesthetic Grammars of Black Modernism in Canada,” published in issue 47.2.

The winning article was selected by a committee of two adjudicators – Cornel Bogle (Simon Fraser) and Shane Neilson (McMaster) – from among the essays that appear in SCL/ÉLC's two issues published in 2023. The prize has a value of $500.

Congratulations Billy!

Congratulations as well to McKenna James Boechner and Nicholas Bradley for receiving honourable mentions from our committee of adjudicators!

Herb Wylie Prize Winners

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) invites interdisciplinary contributions to a special issue on Québécois and Franco-Canadian Literature.

We welcome submissions of essays of 6000-8000 words, including Notes and Works Cited, on topics related to this general theme. English contributions should conform to the MLA Handbook, 8th edition; French submissions to Le guide du rédacteur (Translation Bureau, 1996).

Submissions should be sent via Word attachment to scl@unb.ca.

Deadline for submissions is 1 April 2024.

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) invites interdisciplinary contributions to a special issue on Canadian Drama and the Performing Arts. We welcome submissions of essays of 6000-8000 words, including Notes and Works Cited, on topics related to this general theme. English contributions should conform to the MLA Handbook, 8th edition; French submissions to Le guide du rédacteur (Translation Bureau, 1996).

Submissions should be sent via Word attachment to scl@unb.ca.

Deadline for submissions is 30 April 2023.

The winner of this year’s Herb Wyile Prize in Canadian Literature is Sarah Henzi for her essay“‘And Whom We Have Become’: Indigenous Women’s Narratives of Redress in Quebec,” published in the special issue on “Indigenous Literary Arts of Truth and Redress” (46.2).

The winning article was chosen from among the essays that appear in SCL/ÉLC's two issues published in 2021. The prize has a value of $500.

Congratulations Sarah!

Herb Wylie Prize Winners

Full Announcement

Article submissions are invited for consideration for a special issue of SCL/ÉLC on the theme of The Ruptured Commons. Revised and expanded papers from the ACLALS triennial conference on the theme are welcome, as are papers written independently of the conference that engage with Canadian or Indigenous literatures. Essays should be submitted by 31 December 2022; the issue will be co-edited by John Clement Ball and Asma Sayed and will be published in 2024.

The winner of this year’s Herb Wyile Prize in Canadian Literature is Morgan Vanek (U of Calgary) for her essay “Better ‘Death in Its Most Awful Shapes’ than Life in Nova Scotia: Climate Change and the Nova Scotia Maroons, 1796-1800” in SCL 45.2 (2020).

Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead U) has received an honourable mention for her essay “After Extraction: Idling in the Ruins in Michael Winter’s and Alistair MacLeod’s Neoliberal Fictions," which also appeared in 45.2.

Herb Wyile Prize winners

Our thoughts are with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation and all Indigenous communities across the country. Studies in Canadian Literature stands with all Indigenous peoples in mourning the deaths of the 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and acknowledges the suffering of all victims of the residential schools, those forcibly consigned to these institutions and subsequent generations who still suffer the aftereffects of these crimes as part of Canada’s program of genocide against Indigenous peoples. This is not only a terrible piece of Canadian history, but an ongoing reality of trauma, pain, and injustice that continues to be inflicted on Indigenous people in this country. Justice Murray Sinclair heard accounts of TRC testimonies that described mass gravesites such as the one in Kamloops, yet the Canadian government refused to look into these claims when asked by the TRC to do so. Non-Indigenous Canadians must own this history, and must do so under the leadership of Indigenous people. We at SCL stand with others in calling upon the Government of Canada to fund the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action numbers 71 through 76 regarding missing children and burial information at residential schools across Canada.

#71. We call upon all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies that have not provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada their records on the deaths of Aboriginal children in the care of residential school authorities to make these documents available to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
#72. We call upon the federal government to allocate sufficient resources to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to allow it to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
#73. We call upon the federal government to work with churches, Aboriginal communities, and former residential school students to establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including, where possible, plot maps showing the location of deceased residential school children.
#74. We call upon the federal government to work with the churches and Aboriginal community leaders to inform the families of children who died at residential schools of the child's burial location, and to respond to families' wishes for appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial in home communities where requested.
#75. We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children.
#76. We call upon the parties engaged in the work of documenting, maintaining, commemorating, and protecting residential school cemeteries to adopt strategies in accordance with the following principles: The Aboriginal community most affected shall lead the development of such strategies. Information shall be sought from residential school Survivors and other Knowledge Keepers in the development of such strategies. Aboriginal protocols shall be respected before any potentially invasive technical inspection and investigation of a cemetery site.

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) invites interdisciplinary contributions to this expansive cultural archive of abolitionist and anti-racist art, writing, scholarship, and activism. We welcome reflections on the history of art and activism on Turtle Island/Canada and contributions of new art, creative writing, literary-critical scholarship, manifestoes, and other cultural interventions. We particularly welcome contributions that connect the history of abolitionist and anti-racist activism on Turtle Island/Canada with the activism of the present moment. We are also open to reflections on the issue of special issues themselves as we recognize that Black Lives Matter should not have to be a special issue within the history of Canadian cultural institutions in general and literary critical journals in particular.

Other topics include but are not limited to:

• Anti-Black racism in Canadian arts and cultural organizations
• Anti-Black racism and public health
• The intersections between Black Lives Matter and Indigenous decolonial struggles
• Blackness in (and out of) the Canadian canon
• The pedagogy of Black Canadian literature, from elementary to tertiary levels and beyond
• The intersections of Black Pride and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities with BLM
• The role of publishers and publications, and alternate means of publication
• Disability, ableism, and making space in Black communities
• Monumentalization: How do we remember and account for various histories?
• Acknowledging the elders: ageism and its effects on community
• Multilingualism: How does language affect BLM activism?
• The effects of policing and various social agencies, such as child welfare institutions

English submissions of essays of 6000-8000 words, including Notes and Works Cited, should conform to the MLA Handbook, 8th edition; French submissions to Le guide du rédacteur (Translation Bureau, 1996).

We also welcome poetry, artwork, manifestoes, and other cultural interventions of varying lengths of less than 5000 words.

Please submit all work electronically via Word attachment to scl@unb.ca. Deadline for submissions is 31 August 2021. For further details about submissions, visit the journal’s website at https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL or contact: Camille Isaacs, OCAD University, cisaacs@faculty.ocadu.ca, or Karina Vernon, University of Toronto, karina.vernon@utoronto.ca.

The winner of this year’s Herb Wyile Prize in Canadian Literature is Kait Pinder (Acadia University) for her essay “Action, Feeling, Form: The Aesthetics of Care in Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie” in 44.1 (2019).

Today’s scholarly community revisits women’s writing in Canada during the long 1970s. Seventeen contributions yield new insights into the cultural works produced by women working in French and English, from the west coast to the east, between the mid-to-late 1960s and the early-to-mid 1980s. Contributors revisit and recontexualize feminist works from this period, demonstrating the extent to which they remain amenable to critical recovery for new generations of readers who approach them from multiple formal, theoretical, critical, cultural, and material perspectives.

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) invites essays arising from and/or emerging after the fifth annual gathering of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA) held on unceded Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) territory at the University of British Columbia in June 2019. We invite contributors to reconsider dominant discourses of reconciliation through explorations of Indigenous literatures as expressions of truth, reformation, reclamation, resurgence, and redress.

The winner of this year's Herb Wyile Prize in Canadian Literature is Cornel Bogle for his essay “The Spatial Politics of Homosociality in Austin Clarke’s In This City” in 43.1 (2018).  The winning essay was selected by a committee of three adjudicators – Danielle Fuller (U Alberta), Guy Beauregard (National Taiwan U), and Lorraine York (McMaster) – from among the essays that appeared in SCL’s two issues published in 2018. The prize has a value of $500.

Honourable mention goes to Tania Aguila-Way for “Seed Activism, Global Environmental Justice, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in Annabel Soutar’s Seeds” in 43.1 (2018).

The winner of this year's Herb Wyile Prize in Canadian Literature is Sarah Wylie Krotz for her essay “The Affective Geography of Wild Rice: A Literary Study” published in the special 19^th-Century issue, 42.1 (2017). The winning essay was selected by a committee of three adjudicators — Wendy Roy (Saskatchewan), Jennifer Andrews (UNB), and Faye Hammill (Strathclyde) — from among the essays that appeared in SCL’s two issues published in 2017. The prize has a value of $500.

The prize judges had this to say: 

“The Affective Geography of Wild Rice: A Literary Study” is a remarkable study of how the complex significance of wild rice opens up a rich conversation between “colonial Canadian natural history and Anishnaabe accounts of the plant and its history” to illuminate its role in the past and the present.  By attending to the emotions and bodily sensations of the geography of wild rice as depicted in a variety of literary representations over the past two centuries, Krotz demonstrates how a grain becomes a marker for and representation of an intricate set of interactions that reveal what is lost in translation within the colonial encounter. She also raises critical questions about the singularity of Canadian law by probing the significance of wild rice as a manifestation or embodiment of Anishnaabe law. The result is an article that persuasively and thoughtfully reconfigures how readers may understand the “literary history” of rice and the challenge such a reading poses to the white settler colonial mindset that has so fundamentally shaped English-Canadian literature. 

Honorable mention goes to Chantal Richard for her essay “Discours identitaires véhiculés par les premiers journaux francophones en Acadie (1867-1900): Confédération ou colonisation?” published in 42.1 (2017).