Dionne Brand, photo by Jason Chow.
Celebrate the final chapter of Literary Cabaret: Memoir with an evening of original writing hosted by renowned poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand. Residency participants share selections from their developing work, with a special reading from Brand closing the series.
This two-week residency encourages writers to explore new ideas in memoir, develop creative works of nonfiction, and strengthen their storytelling with the guidance of faculty mentors.
Dionne Brand is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice. A former Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto and a Member of the Order of Canada, Brand’s acclaimed works include A Map to the Door of No Return, The Blue Clerk, Theory, and the Toronto Book Award-winning novel What We All Long For.
Enjoy a drink from the bar, browse a curated selection of books from onsite bookseller Pages Books, and immerse yourself in an evening of memoir. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. in CLVB ’33, with readings beginning at 7:00 p.m. Afterward, mingle with the writers and faculty until 9:30 p.m.
Join us for the final chapter and celebrate the voices, stories, and possibilities of memoir.
Literary Journalism: Memoir Writing residency is supported by the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism.
About Dionne Brand
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. Her work includes nine volumes of poetry, five books of fiction and two non-fiction works. She was the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto from 2009-2012. For her contribution to literature in Canada she received the honor of being made a Member of the Order of Canada.
Brand has also achieved great distinction and acclaim in fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel Theory has won the Bocas Fiction prize 2019. And her volume The Blue Clerk has been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her novel Love Enough was nominated in 2015 for the Trillium Book Award. Her fiction includes the novel In Another Place, Not Here and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her critically acclaimed novel, What We All Long For, which won the Toronto Book Award, is the story of four young people in Toronto – it has been translated into Italian, French, and German. Like thirsty, a recent book of poems, the novel offers an indelible portrait of the multicultural city. Her non-fiction includes Bread Out Of Stone, and A Map to the Door of No Return.
Brand’s work is widely taken up in Black Diaspora Studies, at Universities in North America, the Caribbean and Europe. Her prose work focuses on deconstructing the colonial, neocolonial, and patriarchal structures of living and finding liberatory language to anticipate Black freedom. Numerous literary and cultural critics have written on her considerable body of work. Her non- fiction book A Map to the Door of No Return, a seminal text for many scholars in Black diaspora.
Photo credit: Jason Chow