Born 1953 in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago, Dionne Brand emigrated to Canada in 1970. Her grandparents play a significant role in her upbringing while her mother worked in England, but enrolled at the University of Toronto almost immediately, completing a BA in English and Philosophy in 1975, and acquiring an MA at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education fourteen years later. In the early stages of her career Brand worked at the Toronto Immigrant Women’s Centre as a counselor and picked up a number of temporary academic positions with geographical diversity, but ultimately beginning and returning to University of Guelph where she currently holds a University Research Chair and teaches. Recently Brand was named the poetry editor for McClelland & Stewart, carrying forward from her work editing anthologies early in her career and editor for Brick, a Toronto-based literary journal. Recipient of multiple prestigious literary awards for poetry and fiction alike, including the Governor General’s (1997) Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize (2011), she was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2017. Her writing across boundaries of form and content, confronting profound and pertinent socio-political issues with her writing that is as much incisive criticism towards structural and social injustice, as florid style and tender humanity. In addition to her fiction and poetry, Brand is an activist and founder of the newspaper Our Lives, a previous chair of the Women’s Issues Committee of the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and a documentarian and filmmaker – working through the late eighties to nineties with the National Film Board of Canada.