Cicely Grace
Cicely Grace is a writer based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations (Vancouver). She was a finalist for the 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award and for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Her work as appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Pulp Literature, and The Garden Statuary. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English literature (Honours) and is pursuing a Master of Arts in English literature at UBC.
Her creative work explores themes of girlhood, sexuality, sacredness, and vulgarity. She is currently seeking a publisher for her debut collection HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS?.
Publications and Awards
2025 Bronwen Wallace Award Poetry Finalist for “Rather Her Clean”
“Simmering with mirthy sexuality and posing undeniable questions, Rather Her Clean is driven by an unabashed, unsparing voice. Cicely Grace deftly paints a timeless portrait of a woman and a worker in the city. With a flair for evoking the body’s un/cleanliness, this collection reads like a vicious vow — an ode to the ‘senseless and saturated agonies’ of the present.”
—2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award poetry jury (Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader, and Sanna Wani)
2024 CBC Poetry Prize for “There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen”
"It took me nearly a decade to heal from the experience of being 14 and I don't believe I am alone in that. I wanted to write a poem that captured this year of humiliating inaugurations, a year that was truly 'a series of exposures.' Fourteen was the year I began to resent my girlhood, to see it as a debilitating curse, something I needed to cure myself of.”
—Cicely Grace on writing “There is no netural way to say I was fourteen”
Pulp Literature Issue 44, Autumn 2024, Second Place in the Magpie Award for Poetry,
“A strong personal voice, expanding our sense of what a poem can do int he department of story-telling. I loved all the word-filled sentences, the depth and density. A hybrid of lyric prose and the prose poem. Refreshing to see the line subsumed into the sentence. Lots of possibilities of form.”
—Renee Sarojini Saklikar, judge of the Magpie Award for Poetry
Contemporary Verse 2 Volume 46 Issue 4, Spring 2024, Second Place in the 2023 Foster Poetry Prize
for “Buying a Pregnancy Test in October or Schrodinger’s Fetus”
“As someone who grew up in a hair salon, I love the contrast between the everyday mission of adornment contrasted with the contemplation of a more permanent decision. The writer asks us to consider whether the poem itself cares. The poem itself is a character in this story. I would like to keep reading and I will think about what my poems themselves think.”
—Emily Riddle, judge of the Foster Poetry Prize