Di Brandt served as Winnipeg’s inaugural Poet Laureate in 2018-2019. She is a leading poet, essayist and CanLit scholar, whose literary works are celebrated and studied across Canada, and around the world. Her book titles include the bestselling questions i asked my mother; Agnes in the sky; Now You Care; Walking to Mojácar, with French and Spanish translations by Charles Leblanc and Ari Belathar; Glitter & fall: Laozi’s Dao De Jing, Transinhalations; The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems, and Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry, edited with Barbara Godard.
Di Brandt’s writing is renowned for its wide, innovative reach in subject engagements, musicality, and spiritual/emotional/intercultural/ecopoetic depth, and has received numerous prestigious awards, among them the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award, the Gerald Lampert Award for “Best First Book of Poetry in Canada,” the CAA National Poetry Prize, the Gabrielle Roy Award for “Best Book of Literary Criticism in Canada” (with Barbara Godard), the Manitoba Arts Council Distinction Award, Gold and Silver National Magazine Awards, and an honorary doctorate from Grant MacEwan University. She is proud to be an honorary lifetime member of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild.
Photo credit: Mortimer Mackenzie