Leslie Vryenhoek, author of the magnificent collection of short stories, Scrabble Lessons (Salty Ink’s Featured Book of the Month for January 2010) has just won a very prestigious poetry award: the 2010 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem, and a thousand dollars to boot. Seems it wasn’t enough to blow everyone’s minds with her stellar short fiction debut this fall, she had to show the country she’s a serious poet too.

Judges Eric White and Nora Kelly praised “Letitia’s Cold Footsteps,” for its “nuanced exploration of alienation … [it] takes us into the strangeness of arrival in a new country and makes us shiver … a distinctly Canadian poem.”

Even better news: her prize-winning poem, “Letitia’s Cold Footsteps,” is from a poetry manuscript, dealing with “home and belonging,” that she has recently handed over to her publisher. She’s talented, distinctive, and prolific. What more do you want from a writer. Go buy Scrabble Lessons, go!