When I meet Waterloo high schooler Kyo Lee, she tells me she has just wrapped up a four-hour interview for the Loran scholarship, but, if she is exhausted, it does not show. She is warm, bubbly, and easily the most pepped-up interviewee I have ever had, and the most receptive one, too.
While she is happy to answer questions, she is just as swift to turn the conversation over to me.
How do I like university? How do I graduate? Do I like my English program?
Lee is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. At 17, before she’s even received her high school diploma, she will be a published author by March 2025, when her debut poetry collection, i cut my tongue on a broken country, comes out.
Lee is fast to reiterate how lucky she is with her success.
“I’ve been lucky to have a pretty linear path,” she said.
Part of this luck lay in having early encouragement from a “really great” Grade 8 English teacher who told Lee that she could be a writer—and finding the novel The Outsiders at just the right time.
“I love that book, and S.E. Hinton wrote that book when she was 16, 17, so that kind of led me to start thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I could start writing just like any time’,” she said.
“That’s when I started writing more seriously,” Lee said.
Her English teacher encouraged her and her classmates to submit to Polar Expressions, a nationwide writing contest in Canada geared at young students. Lee entered with her poem, lotus flower blooming into breasts, and came in third place.
She also won another writing contest in grade eight, which encouraged her to keep writing.
“And then I think that kind of taught me, ‘Oh, maybe this is something that I could do’,” Lee said.
Lee had always pictured herself in STEM beforehand and felt unsure on how to move forward.
“Obviously, I was kind of young, and also, there’s not many writing communities in Waterloo,” she says.
Lee finished her first poetry collection in grade eight and then wrote another two manuscripts. She cold-emailed publishers and sent along unsolicited submissions—and three years later, received the attention that would secure her a publishing deal.
At age 16, Lee became the youngest-ever finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, drawing the attention of Arsenal Press, the publisher of her upcoming novel. They asked her for a manuscript, and she used her award-winning entry for the contest as the basis for the draft of her book.
Most of her poems begin with a single line or image. Lee draws inspiration from everywhere, whether visits to museums or other poets she admires like Richard Sikes, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limon and Canadian poet Susan Musgrave.
“I write down things I could use for inspiration in my Notes app…and then I’ll forget about it for, like, two months. And then if I’m lacking inspiration, one day, I’ll just go back to that Notes app,” she said.
Soon after wrapping up her novel came the next win that earned her national recognition and a $6,000 from the Canadian Council of the Arts: the CBC Poetry Prize.
At first, she did not receive the call because her phone was silent.
“They had to email me, telling me, ‘Please pick up’,” she said. “And then I didn’t even register the fact that I won until they said it…It was so exciting.”
Lee is thoughtful.
“I’ve been really lucky,” she says simply. “Your work might have won one year, but like, with a different set of judges, it might not have. So, I’ve been very lucky in that way. And it honestly feels really incredible. It’s still, like, a big, big moment for me.”
Not all the reception was positive. While most peers at school have been congratulatory, others, to Lee’s amusement, question her success.
“At school, there have been people who say, ‘Her poetry isn’t even that good,’ or ‘She was chosen for DEI,’” she said. “It’s a little vulnerable to have people say that, but it doesn’t deter me that much. The people I care about are supportive.”
If she is ever angry, she airs it out in her poems. Fish Market Wedding begins with the line, “sometimes i think of marrying a woman just to piss off my mother.”
There are poems, such as Why I Have Decided to Live, that feel sharp and stifling one moment and lullaby-soft the next as a poem’s speaker eats cherries out of buckets and steps on a train to nowhere.
Lee envelops her reader in the warm, uncertain glow as she writes in Fish Market Wedding, “between yesterday & today / when the world becomes soft.”
It is the place she is in now as the future remains up in the air. She is unsure which post-secondary program she will attend or what her next long-term writing project will be, and she is still figuring out how to have fun. (“I don’t know because, for so long, I haven’t had free time!” she jokes.)
What Lee does know is that she will graduate high school and enter a humanities program. Maybe down the line, she will do an MFA program or writing residency.
For now, she will wind back a bit, tap into her artistic side—she expresses interest in painting and photography—and do some yoga, too.
“The goal is to continue publishing things,” she said.
Leave a Reply