Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral (1990), Land to Light On (1997), thirsty (2002), Inventory (2006), Ossuaries (2010), and The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (2019), all published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. Her collection Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems (Duke University Press, 2022), won the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. 

Brand’s fiction includes InAnother Place, Not Here (1996), At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), What We All Long For (2005), Love Enough (2014), and Theory (2018), all published by Knopf Canada. Her nonfiction includes Bread Out Of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics (Coach House Press, 1994), a book in response to which, Adrienne Rich called Dionne Brand “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, an intellectual conscience for her country,” A Map to the Door of No Return (Random House Canada, 2001), and Salvage: Reading from the Wreck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for nonfiction. In the 1990s, Brand contributed as a director, codirector, and narrator to multiple documentary films for the National Film Board of Canada.

Brand was the recipient of the 1997 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the 1997 Trillium Book Award, the 2003 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the 2006 Harbourfront Writers’ Prize, the 2006 and 2019 Toronto Book Award, the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, and the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. 

Brand served as Toronto’s third Poet Laureate from 2009–2012, and in 2017 she was named to the Order of Canada. Her past positions also include Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer-in-Residence at St. Lawrence University and the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and University Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph. 

Brand was born in Trinidad and currently lives in Toronto, Canada.