Professor Dionne Brand & Professor Christina Sharpe “Black Life in the Wake and the Making of Otherwise Projects”

Professor Brand’s talk is entitled “Nomenclature for the Time Being.” 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 international social justice. Brand won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her volume Ossuaries, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Trillium Book Prize for her volume Land to Light On. She’s garnered two other nominations for the Governor General’s Literary Award for the poetry volumes No Language Is Neutral and Inventory respectively, the latter also nominated for the Trillium and the Pat Lowther. Her 2018 volume, The Blue Clerk, was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. She was the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto 2009-2012. In 2022 Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems was published. She was awarded the Windam-Campbell Prize for fiction in 2021. Her most recent novel, Theory which also won the Toronto Book Award 2019 and the BOCAS fiction prize. Her novel, Love Enough was nominated in 2015 for the Trillium Book Award. Her fiction includes the critically acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, At the Full and Change of the Moon, and, What We All Long For an indelible portrait of the city of Toronto which also garnered the Toronto Book Award. Dionne Brand’s non-fiction includes Bread Out Of Stone, and A Map to the Door of No Return, which has been widely taken up by scholars of Black Diaspora. Dionne Brand was Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies, at the University of Guelph (2004-2022). She holds several Honorary Doctorates (Wilfred Laurier University, University of Windsor, Simon Fraser University, The University of Toronto, York University and Thornloe/Laurentian University). Brand was Poetry Editor at McClelland & Stewart (Penguin Random House Canada) from 2014-2021, and is now Editorial Director of Alchemy and imprint of Knopf Canada. She lives in Toronto and is a member of the Order of Canada.