Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand left Trinidad for Canada in 1970, the year she finished at Naparima Girls' High School, and has published more than twenty books of poetry, fiction and essays since. Ossuaries took the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2011, and Land to Light On had taken the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1997. What We All Long For, published in 2005, tracks four young Torontonians whose lives are pulled about by what their immigrant parents carried into the city, and it won the City of Toronto Book Award the following year. Love Enough arrived in 2014, shorter and more broken up on the page, and the pair have since been reissued together as two Toronto novels. Brand made documentaries with Studio D at the National Film Board between 1989 and 1996, held the post of Toronto poet laureate from 2009 to 2012 as the first Black writer to do so, and edited poetry at McClelland & Stewart for four years. She holds an emeritus professorship at Guelph.