Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand is a Trinidad-born Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist who is one of the most important Black writers in Canada. Her collection Ossuaries (2010) won the Griffin Poetry Prize for a Canadian poet in 2011. She served as Toronto's Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012. Brand has also won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. Brand's poetry is politically engaged, formally innovative, and deeply attentive to the experience of diaspora, race, and gender. Ossuaries is a book-length poem following a character who has abandoned a revolutionary project, meditating on history, diaspora, and the possibilities of political and personal transformation. Her fiction includes In Another Place, Not Here (1996) and What We All Long For (2005). Her non-fiction work A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) is a meditation on diaspora and the experience of the Middle Passage. Brand is a professor at the University of Guelph.