Dionne Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago.
Cultural Diversity Roster
Find a Presenter
speaker
Dionne Brand
Canadian poet, novelist, documentarian, essayist
Categories :
[Sassy_Social_Share]
Bio
Full Bio
Dionne Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago. She graduated from Naparima Girls’ High School in 1970, and immigrated to Canada to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a BA in 1975. Brand later attained a MA (1989) from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She was Toronto’s third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012.
Brand explores themes of gender, race, sexuality and feminism, white male domination, injustices and “the moral hypocrisies of Canada”. She has contributed to many anthologies opposing the violent killings of Black men and women, the massacre of fourteen women in Montreal and racism and inequality as experienced by Aboriginal women of Canada, particularly Helen Betty Osborne’s death in the Pas.
In his book Black Like Who?, Rinaldo Walcott includes two essays (“A Tough Geography”: Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada and “No Language is Neutral”: The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip’s and Dionne Brand’s Poetry) on Brand’s poetry and the principal themes of her work. (Brand herself had previously used a line from Derek Walcott to title her collection No Language is Neutral, in which she “uses language to disturb” in poetry containing biographic meaning ancestral references.) Brand believes that “by addressing real power can we begin to deal with racism”, by participating in economic and political power.
Check Availability
Topics
Topics
An Evening With Dionne Brand.
Videos
Videos
Dionne Brand: Writing Against Tyranny and Toward Liberation
Dionne Brand: The Shape of Language
Books
News
Please Contact Us For More Information
