You can’t pay rent with experimental poetry, so Hilary Peach trained as a welder. Twenty-plus years on, she’s now a boiler inspector, poet, and author of an award-winning memoir, Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood. Peach talks about the joys and contradictions of being an outsider inside the trades.
Two finalists have been named for the $10,000 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for 2023 by Wilfrid Laurier University, which administers the prize. The 2023 finalists are authors Cody Caetano for Half-Bads in White Regalia, published by Hamish Hamilton, and Hilary Peach for Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood ,