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Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice, including particularly issues of gender and race. She was educated at the University of Toronto, where she earned a BA in English and Philosophy and an MA in the Philosophy of Education.

Dionne Brand became prominent first as an award-winning poet, winning the Governor General's Literary Award for her volume Land to Light On, and nominated for the volumes No Language Is Neutral and Inventory respectively. She has won the Pat Lowther Award for poetry and her volume thirsty was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. But she has also achieved great distinction and acclaim in fiction, non-fiction, and film. Her fiction includes the novel In Another Place, Not Here, a New York Times notable book in 1998, and At the Full and Change of the Moon, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year in 1999. (The Village Voice also included Dionne Brand in its 1999 "Writers on the Verge" literary supplement.) Her latest critically acclaimed and Toronto Book Award winning novel, What We All Long For, is the story of four young people in Toronto; like thirsty, a recent book of poems, the novel offers an indelible portrait of this great multicultural city. Her non-fiction includes Bread Out Of Stone, and A Map to the Door of No Return, which is a meditation on Blackness in the diaspora.

Dionne Brand has published eighteen books, contributed to seventeen anthologies, written dozens of essays and articles, and made four documentary films for the National Film Board. She was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at St. Lawrence University in New York and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in both British Columbia and Ontario. She has also held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women�s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She lives in Toronto and presently holds a University Research Chair at the University of Guelph where she is a professor.


Dionne Brand's works copyright © to the author.


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