Renowned poet, novelist and essayist Dionne Brand will deliver the 2021 Kitty Lundy Memorial Lecture with a message of hope.
Known for her formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work, Brand will deliver a talk entitled “What we saw. What we made. When we emerge” on March 11 at 6 p.m. through a webinar and livestream on YouTube.
Brand is a major and singular voice in Canadian writing whose work is notable for the beauty of its language and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice. Brand is a poet engagé, whose work is insistently political, formally beautiful and precise.
Brand’s award-winning poetry books include Land to Light On (the Governor General’s Literary Award and Trillium Book Award); thirsty (The Pat Lowther Award); Ossuaries (the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize). Her latest, The Blue Clerk, an essay poem, won the Trillium Book Award. Theory, her latest of five novels, won the Toronto Book Award. She is the author of the influential non-fiction work, A Map to the Door of No Return. Her most recent non-fiction work is An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading. Brand is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
She was recognized with an honorary doctor of letters during York’s Fall 2019 Convocation.
Once the registration has reached capacity, this event will be streamed live on YouTube.
The annual Kitty Lundy Memorial Lecture honours the late Kitty Lundy, an admired educator of sociology who was associated with York University’s former Atkinson Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies from 1986-89. Lundy was known for her commitment to students, her deep connection to social justice issues and passion for teaching.
To honour her memory, the Lundy family established the Kitty Lundy Memorial Fund, which supports the annual lecture. Each year, the memorial lecture features an individual whose scholarship and creativity address principles to which Kitty Lundy exhibited commitment: engaged learning, equity, and the dissemination and exchange of ideas and knowledge with communities residing within and outside of York University.