Brilliant and essential: adjectives that could describe any of poet, novelist, and deep thinker Dionne Brand’s works but especially apply to her first major book of nonfiction in more than 20 years: Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. Brand offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and of what remains in the wreck of empire. She demonstrates how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of older, colonial, imperialist, and racist texts, and shares how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive and in order to live. Join us to explore these deeply important, groundbreaking ideas on stage. Moderated by Kimberly Bain.
Presented in partnership with Hogan’s Alley Society.
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KIMBERLY BAIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia—Vancouver. Her most pressing and urgent concerns have consolidated around questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora. She is currently at work on two scholarly monographs. The first, entitled On Black Breath, traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. Her second book, Black Alchemy: Dirt, Soil, and Other Dark Matter, turns to dirt for understanding how Blackness has shaped global considerations of the Anthropocene and refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism.
Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Brand is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Prize and the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She is the Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and University Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
