Di Brandt (born 31 January 1952) (née Janzen) often stylized as di brandt, is a Canadian poet and scholar from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She became Winnipeg's first Poet Laureate in 2018.
Life and career
Brandt grew up in Reinland, a Mennonite farming village in southern Manitoba near Winkler. Her first volume of poetry questions i asked my mother was published by Turnstone Press in 1987. Since then she has published seven more volumes of poetry, as well as literary criticism. Brandt has degrees from the University of Manitoba and University of Toronto and has also taught Canadian literature and creative writing. She was poetry editor at Prairie Fire Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2 during the 1980s and 90s. She also served as Manitoba and Prairie Rep at the League of Canadian Poets National Council and the Writers' Union of Canada National Council. In 2018, she became the first Poet Laureate of Winnipeg, a position she held through 2019, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by MacEwan University in 2021.
Bibliography
Poetry: questions i asked my mother (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1987) Agnes in the sky (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1990) mother, not mother (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1992) Jerusalem, beloved (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1995) Now You Care (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2003) The Lottery of History (Brandon, MB: Radish Press, 2008). Chapbook. Walking to Mojacar, with French and Spanish translations by Charles Leblanc and Ari Belathar (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2010) SHE: Poems inspired by Laozi, with ink drawings by Lin Xu (Brandon, MB: Radish Press, 2012). Chapbook. The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2022)
Essays: Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press 1993). Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies for Writing Across Centuries (Toronto: Mercury Press 1996). Re:Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation (Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press 2006), ed. with Barbara Godard. So this is the world & here I am in it (Edmonton: NeWest Press 2007). Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2011), ed. with Barbara Godard.
Collaborations: Awakenings: In Four Voices, a collaborative poetry/music audiorecording (CD) with Dorothy Livesay (posthumously), Carol Ann Weaver and Rebecca Campbell (2003). Emily, The Way you Are, a one-woman chamber opera about the life and work of Emily Carr, with musical score by Jana Skarecky, premiered at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, ON, in 2011, featuring mezzo-soprano Ramona Carmelly and the Talisker Players directed by Gary Kulesha. Watermelon Syrup: A Novel with Annie Jacobsen and Jane Finlay-Young (WLUP 2011). Coyotes do not carry her away, a musical setting of Di Brandt's poems, by Manitoba composer Kenneth Nichols, commissioned by the Brandon Chamber Society and premiered at Brandon City Hall in 2012, featuring Naomi Forman (soprano), Catherine Wood (clarinet) and Ann Germani (harp).