Literary Journalism: Memoir 2026

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

Dr. Kyo Maclear is an essayist, editor, novelist and children’s author. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages, published in over twenty-five countries, and garnered nominations from the Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the National Magazine Awards. Her nonfiction books include the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), winner of the Trillium Book Award, and Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets (2023). She holds a doctorate in Environmental Humanities and teaches writing at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA and Humber School for Writers. She is an editor-at-large with Tundra Books/Penguin Random House Canada where she curates a collection called CRAFT.

www.kyomaclearkids.com

Simon Thibault is the Non-Fiction Acquisitions Editor at Goose Lane Editions, Canada’s oldest independent book publisher. While there he has acquired travelogues, memoirs of survival and resilience, and biographies of long-lost family legacies. Based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Simon is also an editor, having worked as a developmental and substantive editor on culinary memoirs, queer histories, and cultural legacies. His own work has been featured in The Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post, CBC Radio and Radio-Canada. His first book, Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food, was shortlisted for the Taste Canada prize.