Wallace, Bronwen

Brownwen Wallace was born in 1945 in Kingston, Ontario. Wallace earned both a B.A. (1967) and M.A.(1969) at Queen's University. Upon graduation, she moved to Windsor, where she founded a women's bookstore, and worked with a variety of women's groups. It was in Windsor that Wallace started to write poetry. Wallace returned to Kingston in the late 1970s, and continued her volunteer work with women's organizations. Her work at Interval House, a Kingston women's shelter, was of particular influence. Wallace also began to teach courses in creative writing at both St. Lawrence College and Queen's University, and went on to help found the Women's Studies department at the latter.

Her first collection of poetry, Marrying into the Family, was published in 1980, and was printed and bound together with Mary di Michele's Bread and Chocolate. She published three more collections of poetry over the next seven years: Signs of the Former Tenant (Oberon, 1983), Common Magic (Oberon, 1985), and The Stubborn Particulars of Grace (McClelland & Stewart, 1987). In addition to writing Wallace created or co-created three films: All You Have To Do (1982), What She's Been Doing Lately (1983), and That's Why I'm Talking (1984). From May 1987 to February 1989, Wallace contributed a weekly column, In Other Words, to the Kingston Whig Standard.

Wallace died of cancer at the age of 44 in 1989. Two collections of Wallace's work were published posthumously: People You'd Trust Your Life To (McClelland & Stewart, 1990), a book of short stories and Keep That Candle Burning Bright (Coach House Press, 1991), a collection of poetry. A compilation, edited by Joanne Page, of Wallace's Whig Standard articles, as well as various other essays, was published by Quarry Press, under the title Arguments With The World, in 1992. She was survived by her partner Chris Whynot and her son Jeremy Baxter.

In 1994 the Bronwen Wallace Award was established with the Writer's Trust of Canada to be awarded each year to a young poet or short fiction writer who is not yet published, and who is under the age of 35.