That smile of hers! It is sly and inviting, and knowingly filled with a self-possessed, quiet joy of intellectual restlessness. Among many people, simply saying the name Dionne Brand — a name always said in full — brings smiles to faces, too. And then there is her voice: its tone, its rhythm, its smooth, sensuous timbre. Try reading her poetry out loud, and you will begin to hear how her words inhabit you and how you begin to sound just like her.
Dionne Brand is one of Canada’s best living poets. She is also a daring and challenging novelist, a politically thoughtful essayist, an editor and filmmaker. And if that were not enough, Brand is a professor of creative writing at Guelph University, and a teacher and mentor to young women poets, artists and intellectuals. Putting all of those things together, Brand is an intellectual whose range and reach is breathtaking and whose contributions to contemporary culture are unparalleled.
To fully grasp how special Brand and her writing are, one must read across her work as it moves from her local geographies to the global. In long poems, in novels, in essays and in films, Brand has given us maps that mark Black complexity — our laughter, our sorrow, our hurt and our joy — and, in doing so, she has written the ordinary story of our Black queer existence without ever spectacularizing us as other than we might be.
Arts Pfft
Arts what an awful year, baby boomers are responsible for all the evil they unleashed
Arts Super Queeros. CBC does it again