Guest Poet, Di Brandt
photo credit: Mortimer Mackenzie
Di Brandt is an internationally renowned and multiple award-winning poet, scholar, editor, translator and teacher. Her poetry titles include her bestselling debut collection questions i asked my mother (Turnstone Press, 1987; re-issued in a 30th anniversary tribute edition with Afterword by Tanis Macdonald, 2016); Agnes in the sky (1990); Now You Care (Coach House Press, 2003); Walking to Mojacar, with French and Spanish translations by Charles Leblanc and Ari Belathar (2010); Glitter & fall: Laozi's Dao De Jing, Transinhalations (2019); and most recently, The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems (2022). Her critical works include a collection of creative-critical essays, So this is the world & here I am in it (NeWest Writers as Critics X, ed. Smaro Kamboureli, 2007), and the anthology, Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry, edited with Barbara Godard (WLUP, 2009). Di Brandt has held teaching and research appointments at five different Canadian universities, and has given poetry readings and guest lectured in Canadian Literature and Creative Writing around the world. She has collaborated extensively with musicians and visual artists in the creation of new and innovative multimedia works, most notably, the interspecies installation Working in the Dark, with Aganetha Dyck and honeybees (De Leon White Gallery, 1997, and elsewhere; a creative essay about this collaboration appears in Brandon University's online journal Ecclectica); and Coyotes do not carry her away, with Kenneth Nichols (Brandon Chamber Players, 2013, and elsewhere; an audio video recording of this 20 minute suite for soprano, clarinet and harp was published on YouTube by Turnstone Press, featuring Tracy Dahl, Micah Heilbrunn and Richard Turner. Di Brandt currently teaches Canadian Literature at the University of Winnipeg. She was appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate of Winnipeg for 2018-2019) and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Grant MacEwan University in 2019. In 2023 she received the Manitoba Arts Council Award of Distinction.